Transformers: Prime Divide
by Karmic Acumen
Summary: Sam refused to think it was over after Bumblebee was captured by Sector Seven and they all were carted off like criminals in the middle of the night. He just didn't expect the next bout of interference to come from within Sector Seven itself. In hindsight, though, that brazen, amazing spy hermit was right: Primus HAD only ever given life to ONE planet.
1. Arc I-1: Distress Call

**Preface**

"**-. .-"**

**A/N:** Well, what happened with Harry Potter happened again, only for a different fandom. I got a plot bunny that didn't let me easily fall asleep one night, and since some of the themes here will help me figure out the rest of the plot for a certain original fiction I've been cooking up, I'm giving Transformers a try.

There won't be any time travel in this one. It _does_ share some themes with HP: DEM though. Particularly that since the films (especially the second one) are rife with railroading and deus ex machinas (the Dynasty of Primes came totally out of nowhere), I am adding my own Divine Intervention as counterweight. After all, it's not an asspull (Deus Ex Machina in the strict sense) if divine meddling is _expected_.

Nothing as blatant as the one in my previous story though. It's mostly meant to give a plausible reason why Sam is such a wimpy loser in all the films, and why he will be everything BUT here.

The narration will happen in first person, and the point of view will switch between Sam and Optimus Prime, with some other characters sometimes getting their turn.

Also, romance is not going to be the focus here, but there will be some pairings, most notably Sam/Mikaela and (eventually, many chapters down the line) Optimus/Elita-One.

Finally, please note that the main genre here is Spiritual for a reason. Well, Sci Fi is the main one, but that's obvious for Transformers so I'm not even going to bother listing it, especially since I can only choose two when it should be something like Sci-Fi/Spiritual/Adventure/Family/Drama/Hurt-Comfort and, why not, even a bit of Romance here and there.

**Transformers: Prime Divide**

**Arc I: Cognitive Readjustment**

Chapter 1: Distress Call

"-. .-"

Earth was much noisier than Cybertron, owing to a much denser atmosphere. Virtually every motion made by a person or object caused a strong enough ripple through the air to be picked up by our audio receptors. It was not too long after our arrival on this planet that we had to adjust our audio sensitivity downwards, in order to avoid our performance being impaired by the sensory overload. Our processors _would_ have handled the strain of hearing the movement of every blade of grass within a five hundred meter radius, if we did not require the processing resources for other things, such as staying alive on a potentially hostile world and completing our mission without causing unnecessary loss of life.

I knew that, in time, our programming will adjust to the different planetary conditions and we will become more accustomed to processing more incoming data without sacrificing operational efficiency. For now, though, our constant use of energon detectors and motion-, electromagnetic- and bio-scanners was more important.

And yet, even with the adjustment to our audio sensors, we could hear better and farther than any human, so I could not claim that we were traveling in silence. But as I led my Autobots down this seemingly endless, empty man-made road in the middle of the night, following the directions burned by Megatron's navigation systems into a pair of flimsy glass lenses held together by a frail metal string, I could not help but feel that it was far too quiet. Despite the wind shearing, roaring against our frames, the silence between us was heavy and stifling, like a noose slowly grinding against my spark chamber.

None of my soldiers felt the urge to communicate, even amongst themselves. Not even through private comms, and I would have known if they were. Somehow, I always knew when my kin were having a private conversation, even if I was not privy to it.

It was made all worse by the fact that I knew this was not my Autobots staging a silent protest for my decision. They had vocally contested it, yes, Ironhide had even objected to my choice to not risk harm to the humans even at the cost of one of our own, but in the end they accepted my command in silence. Even when I voiced my intention to destroy the cube along with myself if it came down to it, they backed me.

All because, to them, I was Optimus Prime. Because even if I were to make the choice that would doom our entire race's future and set us on the inevitable path to extinction, it was _my_ choice to make, my _right_, because my helm bore a Glyph that happened to match some old writings in an ancient archeological dig, and because of that, to them, I was a _Prime_.

The primitive asphalt felt rough against my tires, and my internal sensors and adjustment subroutines were working constantly to compensate for every inch-tall bump, but when that was the only load on my processors, I had little to distract me from my musings. I half-expected Ironhide to chime in and grumble something about brooding not being a Primely thing to do, but no such thing occurred. I took that to mean that he was valiantly holding himself in check, because he did not trust himself not to say something disrespectful to me for leaving behind Bumblebee.

Oh, Ironhide tried to hide his worry for Bumblebee by protesting a different matter. Why should we save the humans if they were such a primitive and violent race? But really, were we so different, once upon a time? I called Ironhide out on it over a private comm, pointed out that it had been _him_ leading the Thetacon tribes that waged war on us, all those vorns before human civilization even emerged, just because they believed Sentinel Prime was a crazed fraud for saying the AllSpark existed and could be found (and it had).

Before we touched down on this planet, I studied the transmissions of the people here, and I was stunned by how similar they were to us, but so young. All of them _children_, but twice as tenacious as our own hatchlings. After failing the young of my own race when Megatron bombed all youth sectors, I could not even fathom bringing harm to these organics, these beings whose lives burned for so short a time, but which could burn so _bright_ despite their frailty.

I did not have to explain that to Ironhide. My reminder of his past actions were enough. But despite him backing down, I am left wondering if perhaps I am just rationalizing my decision to sacrifice anything for the beliefs that have carried me through this endless war.

I suppose it was the perfect setup to a cosmic joke, to make me have to choose between them and my _own_ last youngling.

Innocent, bright, _precious_ Bumblebee.

I could not understand how my spark did not flare in self-disgust at the blatant hypocrisy of my own thoughts. _Precious_. I chose a wonderful method to show he was _precious_.

Bumblebee, who Ironhide had mentored at my request after that fiasco, hundreds of vorns ago, when Megatron told the yellow bot and his squad to arrest me, only to have Starscream try to ambush and offline us all. Bumblebee who, even before that, had _not_ been just a random hatchling from the second generation of new protoforms brought into being by the AllSpark. Even if everyone believed it, Bumblebee included, I knew better. I always carried the evidence with me, in the form of a Creator bond I kept totally blocked at all times.

The truth was that Bumblebee was the very _first_ new spark created by the Cube after I, Megatron and my mentor Sentinel Prime unearthed the Temple of Al Simfur and, with it, the AllSpark. Just an orn before it was powered by the device Wheeljack invented, which teleported a sun into orbit, I was alone in the Simfur temple main chamber, studying the Cyberglyphics. The Cube, which we thought was totally depleted, flared once and struck me with a mighty surge of AllSpark energy. I was thrown across the hall and knocked into stasis by the blast, and when I recovered Ratchet pronounced me to be in perfect condition. Even better than I was before the event in fact. My Spark had been reenergized and all my systems were at optimum efficiency.

We all thought that was the only effect, and in the excitement of having real, tangible _proof_ that the Cube really was the AllSpark we had been searching for, the artefact that finally ended the war with Ironhide's disbelieving Thetacons, we set the issue behind us. Not looking a gift horse in the mouth, as humans would say.

I do not know even now how it was that Bumblebee only activated during the second hatching, or how his spark survived that long, unless it found a protoform somewhere, somehow, and stayed in stasis for an age (_without_ a constant energon supply), until it inexplicably got mixed up with the second generation birthed by the AllSpark during the latter half of my joint rule with Megatron.

I also know not how it was that we never ended up within a close enough proximity of each other for the bond to activate, as Bumblebee matured. Seeing as how I tended to visit all major cities on a regular basis, even as I kept up my archeological digs, it should have happened, especially since I always visited the youth sectors.

In the end, the first time I actually met Bumblebee was when he and Cliffjumper, a friend of his with a similar frame but colored red, applied for work as guards for the Al Simfur temple. Then again, it was not truly a meeting. More like he was submitting his application chit while I was looking upon the chamber from behind a two-way mirror on an overlooking platform. Our connection flared, like it should have done had I actually built his frame and brought it before the Cube to be given life. It brimmed with my surprise and his shock, his confusion, then came fear and panic, panic, _panic-_

I shuttered the bond closed immediately, before it could cause the youngling to succumb to the processor crash I could see building up. I internally flinched at his reaction – his reaction to being touched by my spark – but if _I_ could not manage to make sense of how the bond made _me_ feel, how could I expect him to take it well without even knowing what it was? It had startled me, taken me by surprise as much as it had him. I had not even been aware it existed before that point, unlike him.

I brushed my mind against the bond only twice after that, both times in the privacy of my quarters, and I realized he had, in fact, recognized what it was. But when I felt his longing for his Creator being pushed aside by defiant independence – he had _always_ felt the void of the bond, felt _abandoned_ by his creators among the other AllSpark creations, and wanted to make it on his own just to prove he _could_ – I did not find the will to immediately reveal myself, explain myself. So I put the block in place, shunted it to a corner of my mind, though it pained me to do so, until I could build a rapport with him, hopefully enough that he would listen to what I had to say when I confronted him on this matter.

Only later did I realize that I was only failing him a second time through that delay.

Only later did I realize that the mere fact he had _stayed_ at the temple instead of withdrawing his application, despite knowing his creator was there, meant that, deep down, he still wanted to meet them.

I had his application accepted, and that of his friend – I could not deprive him of the familiarity of Cliffjumper after such an experience, despite the bot's rather wild nature – and as I gradually established a tentative working relationship, possible only thanks to my anonymity as his Creator, I encouraged him when he expressed his admiration of the Temple Priests. Encouraged him to become an Acolyte, a priest in training, taught to link with and handle the Cube.

Then, Megatron severed the brother bond we shared (I had to force my processors away from the drive space where _those_ memories were stored). He began to covet and secure more power, and my reluctance to stand up to him only fueled his ego. Then we were attacked by Nebula forces, just as my Science Division was unearthing the artefacts responsible for the strange surges of energy the Cube was giving off, and Megatron used that as a rallying point to create a new faction and bring war upon Cybertron once again.

Sometimes I still wonder if it was a mistake to break into Megatron's quarters looking for the artefact he had taken out of the hands of the science division despite it being beyond his purview. But I know that even in absence of that pretext, he would have engineered a reason to have me arrested. That he sent Bumblebee and Cliffjumper to do it felt like a cosmic farce. That it was all a ploy to have Starscream ambush and offline us was what ultimately made me decide to see the situation for what it was, Civil War, and assume my role as Optimus Prime even if I still did not believe the glyph on my helm meant anything.

Instead of a descendant of the Dynasty of Primes, I could have merely been part of a line of archive clerks for all we knew. But everyone else believed it, and if it allowed me to safeguard those who would not succumb to Megatron's madness, if it enabled me to rally my brethren away from his poison, then so be it.

To this day I am surprised I did not terminate Starscream for Bumblebee's role in that disaster. I spared him, even as I blew up the city of Metrotitan while Megatron was creating his new faction.

After that, all thoughts of acknowledging the bond between Bumblebee and I disappeared from my processor. He may not have been happy, but he was content and he had his _life_, something I could not guarantee if his connection to me was revealed and made him a target. A dangerous thing for a scout that often traveled alone. And in those moments, which came more frequently than I wanted to admit, when my resolve faltered, I remembered the defiance I felt when I brushed the bond all those vorns ago, and told myself it had been his choice as much as mine, even if we had made it separately.

After a while my motivations changed. My despair threatened to overcome me as my planet became more dead than alive. I made some foolish choices, fell for Megatron's deceptions, fake offers of peace, time and again, until the numbers of Autobots offlined when coming to rescue me from my foolishness – offlined brothers and creators or caretakers of my _clansmen_ – were too much to bear. Subroutines and firewalls had to be developed to prevent a bond-brother's death from also killing the other. But even so kin bonds were lost, mine included. The femmes, the ones that most often maintained the clans and had the most bonds, were hunted down.

It left me bitter, and for a while all I could concern myself with was ending Megatron and everything he stood for. For betraying our race as much as for betraying _me_. I stopped to take a look at myself – saw I was becoming like _him_ – only when I alienated Elita-One, but there was no time to repair things between us by the time I had the AllSpark launched into space. After that, we all broke off, splintered, each going off to look for the Cube among different stars, hopefully preventing our war from endangering other worlds.

And now, here we were, involving human children. Just another item to add to my long list of failures.

And Bumblebee…

Yes, it had been his choice to jump out of hiding and save those children, exposing himself, but he had had to do it because _I_ had dropped them. The list always seems to grow longer and longer.

Perhaps I have fallen into the other extreme. I see it unacceptable that our actions would inflict our war upon this innocent planet, to the extent that I am willing to let my own kin be captured and taken instead of risking his captors harm.

At least our routes seem to coincide, so we are ultimately following them, albeit on a parallel, not too distant road. My assumption that the humans would take Bumblebee to the same location as the AllSpark has proven true, if nothing else. It is poor consolation, but at this point I will take what I can get.

I have long been fighting a hopeless war.

My sensors picked up a familiar sort of radiation passing through my frame. Ratchet. He was driving a few meters behind me, and I wondered just what he was picking up if he felt the need to run a medical scan on me while still in motion. I pinged him and waited for him to open a private comm line. I could have done it myself, but medics need to figure out scan results in their own time. When he did, I asked. :Have you found anything my own inner sensors missed?: We were decavorns past the point where I minded him doing it without my assent.

The medic's even voice held no more inflexion than usual, but it did not matter once the reply came. _:Just checking for spark damage.:_

I almost swerved off the road in shock.

He was looking for the kind of spark damage that occurred when a bond-brother or descendant got offlined.

I had to redirect part of the memory assigned to monitoring interstellar transmissions towards my main processor in order to prevent any other obvious reactions.

He_ knew_. _:How…?:_

_:You forget that I've never allowed anyone to miss their periodic checkups, Prime:_ Ratchet replied. _:And that includes you and Bumblebee. Deep-spark scans are an essential part of those.:_

_:… There are no scans that can identify who the bond nodes link to: _

_:No offense, prime, but even if it wasn't already obvious from how you and Bumblebee are the only ones left of us that still have kin bonds of any kind, besides the twins and Ironhide and Chromia, your reaction to my earlier answer gave you away.:_

I raised my firewalls fully and ran a deep-level program that forcefully synched my resources until there was no outward evidence of how truly rattled I was. _:You will inform __no one__, Ratchet. Do you understand?: _I did not intend to explain why I was so set on this matter and I had no desire to dwell on it either.

_:Understood,:_ Ratched crisply acquiesced. _:Not like I'll have to do anything differently from what I've been doing for the past 200 vorns.:_

I was glad I had reassigned those resources earlier. It was all that made sure I did not swerve like I was glitched on high grade again.

He had known for that long… roughly 1600 human years. Had he told Bumblebee of his suspicions in regards to it? The suspicions I had just confirmed?

Likely not, because if our status had been revealed he would have most likely complained on and off about what a waste of a perfectly good bond it was to refuse to acknowledge our roles in each other's lives. He might have recruited the others to his cause as well, I pondered with bitter humor.

I was about to say something else to him when a high-priority uplink flashed in my virtual heads-up display. Security codes were instantly recognized and another secure comm came online.

Despite all the resource adjustment I had carried out over the past breem, my engine still revved in astonishment when Bumblebee's voice spoke in my audials. _:Bumblebee to Prime. Please respond ASAP.:_

_:Youngling!:_ I could not help myself blurting that, and I thanked Primus that I did not slip and say anything actually incriminating. Once I managed to get a grip on my frayed circuits, I quickly pulled over to the side of the road and opened up the link to the others. :Bumblebee! Status report!:

_:Whoa whoa, wait, what?:_ Jazz stopped next to me, surprised and hopeful in equal parts. _:Lil'buddy, ya' really there?:_

_:All systems online.:_ Why, oh, _why_ did he sound so off-balance then? _:Nothing essential has been permanently affected by the harpoons or liquid nitrogen.:_

_:I'll be the judge of that!:_ Ratchet snapped over the comm. _:Then we'll have a talk about dismissing potential frame and system problems after being forcefully pushed into stasis.:_

_ :And __I'll__ have to run you through basic drills for a decacycle after he's done with you!:_ Ironhide cut in._ :Primus, youngling! How could you let yourself be captured by those squishies after all the training I gave you?:_

For the love of Primus, did he never change? I knew that the amount of time Ironhide spent training others was proportional to the level of concern he had for their wellbeing, but did he have to choose the drill sergeant routine over tact _each and every time_? I _knew_ he was not emotionally inept. He _knew_ better than to keep up the attitude just for its own sake.

I was about to open a private link and express my disappointment, but Bumblebee beat me to it.

_ :Because, clearly, that training covered every possible scenario there could ever be, including methods for miraculously becoming invulnerable when weapons specifically designed to take us down start being fired on my position from all directions!:_ Bumblebee's reply was positively scathing. So much that I was left speechless. Knowing how much Bumblebee looked up to Ironhide, and how fond the latter was of the former, I could only listen in growing stupefaction. _:Including achieving that Primus-worthy feat while trying to cradle, in your servos, precious cargo that could easily shatter! Oh, and of course, that training includes getting out of any bind someone could possibly land in after trying to ensure Pr… no one would have to live with the guilt of dropping Sam and the female to their deaths after all they did was help us!: _I felt at once humbled and wretched. He was concerned for my feelings, even after I let him be taken… Did he not hold that against me at all?_ :Yes, the perfect solution to all that could __surely__ have been found in all that __firefight training__ you've given me. That I was expressly forbidden to retaliate using said firepower was no issue __at all__!:_

Even though it should not have been possible over comm links, I could feel the shock as it ripped through the three Autobots around me. Cybertron did not lack sarcasm, but it also did not have it developed to the level of an art form like it was on Earth. Clearly, Bumblebee had internalized the concept to an extent none of us could hope to match at this point in time. Except for Jazz perhaps, but my lieutenant seemed content to slacken his chassis suspensions in what could only be admiration.

_:… Bumblebee…" _Ratchet tried, surprisingly wary_. :Are you really alright? You __never__ lose your temper... Did those humans do anything-:_

_:It has nothing to do with the humans!: _The yellow bot snapped again. But neither of us believed everything was really fine. Not even needing to signal the others, I left the road and took to the empty fields, right in the direction I knew Bumblebee had been heading. They followed me across the rough terrain, not daunted by the speed I was gaining._ :At least not… I'm not…: _Seeing his bluster so easily popped only made me worry more. _:I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap at anyone. I'll submit to any disciplinary measures after the mission is over.:_

_ :No.: _That was Ironhide. _:I was out of line.:_

I wondered if the other two were as surprised as I was by that admission.

_:I may outrank you, but for this mission you report directly to Prime, so only he has the authority to criticize your performance unless he delegates the task to another, and if that ever happens it will be to Prowl, not me. And you're also right about your assessment of the situation, and if the time comes when either of them evaluates you, I'll tell them the same thing.:_

_ "…I'm sorry, Ironhide.:_

_:Yeah… I am too.: _And when _Ironhide_ did not go all gun-happy or start cussing when things became uncomfortable, it was _serious_. _:Just… where __are__ you Bumblebee? You never said… do you need backup? How did you escape?:_

_ :I didn't escape.:_

I decided it was high time I finally rejoined the conversation. _:They still have you? Or did they set you free?: _Could I have been wrong about the humans after all?

_ :The Sector Seven troops have been neutralized. All of them:_

I almost did not drive around a boulder properly.

_:Did you slag them?: _Ironhide asked hopefully.

_ :Ironhide!: _I chided, but I, too, was curious. _:Bumblebee, Report. Properly this time.:_ Honestly, that should have been the first thing we had him do. This conversation had truly gotten out of control before it even started.

_:I came back online four and a half breems ago to find that the four manned aircraft that took me down were gone, and that all the cars making up the Sector Seven convoy had come to a halt in a disorderly fashion all over the highway. Given lingering gas particles in the air, I suspect an airborne compound was responsible. All humans are accounted for and unconscious, save for the one who facilitated my release by shutting down the automated software which ensured liquid nitrogen was sprayed on me in a constant flux. Sir… the human. It's… this makes no sense, sir. It's Sam, but...:_

_ :Sam?: _I was as incapable of processing that as the next bot.

_ :Ye're sayin' the kid took out everybody there?: _Jazz dared ask what we all wanted to know.

_:I don't know!: _Bumblebee said miserably._ :All I know is that when I got my bearings and came out of the battle mode I'd reflexively entered after I came loose of the trailer, I scanned Sam like I always do! And I've been having trouble staving off a processor glitch ever since. I need backup, fast! I need Ratchet here!:_

_ :We are coming.: _I told him. If he thought he had a processor glitch despite systems showing green, it meant something that defies logic had happened. Something even he had trouble processing._ :We headed for you as soon as you contacted us. We will be there in a few kliks. What is __wrong__ Bumblebee?:_

_ :It's Sam! This… my scanners must have been fritzed by the freezing. The readings show his insides all wrong! And he's behaving oddly-:_

_ :Oddly how?: _Ratched asked.

_ :He's just… I don't know! He just is!:_

_ :Alright, hold on!: _We finally got to the main road. _:We have almost reached your location.:_ It was a long time ago that I had last heard Bumblebee so distressed while giving a report, mostly due to him always avoiding any sort of emotional ties to his mission objectives. Somehow, Samuel Witwicky had achieved what nothing had done before in the past several thousand human years: turned Bumblebee's happy-go-lucky attitude into something sparkfelt instead of just a coping mechanism.

As I accelerated down the highway we had abandoned in favor of stealth, I could only wish that this miracle had not come hand-in-hand with this emotional upheaval. Alas, this seems to be one result that attachments always bring.


	2. Arc I-2: Divine Intervention

**A/N: **Before anyone asks, I won't be introducing any OCs, not really. The character in this chapter is mostly a plot device (by his own choice, as bizarre as it may sound), though I did try to give him a personality.

* * *

**Chapter 2: Divine Intervention**

"-. .-"

I used to resent not being allowed out past 9 PM. When I finally reached my second year in High School and turned 17 (I'm one of those kids with their birthday a week after the start of the school year), my parents finally gave me some more leeway. Dad even said he'd buy me a car if I raised part of the cash and got good grades, and I managed to pull it off, even for my genealogy report (barely). The rest should have been pretty straightforward, right? Get the mark, go to a car lot, buy a used car and get it to look good as new with a fresh paint job. Then proceed to cruise around through Tranquility – my home town – and finally get noticed by everyone who wouldn't give me the time of day before, until the universe finally realized it owed me some slack and let me bag the girl of my dreams.

Given all the time I've had to myself since I was a kid, due to my complete and utter failure to stand out –even Mikaela Banes, said girl of my dreams, didn't even realize we'd been in the same class since fifth grade- I've had enough time to envision things and plan them out in my head. Up to the drive-in late night movie and going to the Lookout afterwards, even cuddling on the car bonnet while staring at the stars. It would have ended with me driving her home near midnight, sharing our first kiss on her doorstep and setting a date for the follow-up (which would hopefully conclude with us making out on the backseat before we repeated the final two steps of the previous date).

None of those plans bore fruit. The only thing I did manage to do was bag the girl (I think?), but even that happened because my ever so carefully laid plans were driven completely off the rails by a close encounter of the third kind. Or, really, several of them.

So now it's past 1 at night and I, Samuel James Witwicky, am in a government-issued black van, being carted off to God knows where by some clandestine secret agency. All because I bought a car that turned out to be a giant alien robot.

Who knew?

I didn't blame Bumblebee for this, even though I did think he was Satan's Camaro for a while. How could I blame him? The guy saved my life, and Mikaela's too, when we slipped off Optimus while he was hanging off the bridge, hiding us from Sector Seven helicopters. I was still astonished at that happening actually. Optimus Prime was essentially the leader of an alien race, and he played Spiderman, _hid_ just so he could protect us, even though he could have easily left us to fend for ourselves after getting my grandfather's glasses.

But Bumblebee… 'Bee jumped out of hiding just to catch the two of us, only to get himself captured for his trouble. _Impaled_ by helicopters and _frozen_. God, the horrible, keening sounds he made. Do these robots –Autobots – even feel pain? It sure sounded like it.

I had to close my eyes and force back the urge to be sick, but that only made it easier to see the memory of it in my head again. And with it came an irrational surge of _rage_. Optimus Prime and the others could have saved him. Easily. That big black guy, Ironhide, could have probably brought down the helicopters by himself. They could have freed Bumblebee, _should_ have saved him, but instead they hid and let Bumblebee get carted off, just because Optimus Prime didn't want us humans hurt in any way by their alien war. I'm all for _that_, I'm just angry that the humans spared here are assholes that don't seem inclined to repay that goodwill in any way. I've never been ashamed of my race before, but now…

"Hey hey! Kid! Are you listening?"

My eyes snapped opened and I glared at that creep. Seymour Simmons, the apparent leader of this clandestine agency. Or at least the head of the group sent to apprehend us. Me and my parents, and because she was there Mikaela got taken too. I wonder if she'll ever forgive me for that. Sure, it _was_ her choice to get in that Camaro with me after Barricade attacked us, but it was still _me_ that persuaded her to do it.

Seymour Simmons. _This_ was the kind of life Optimus Prime felt they should spare? Spare at the cost of one of their own?

Simmons must have thought that smiling would unnerve me, and he was right, but only because it looked like a leer. "Worried about your girlfriend?" He taunted, and I wanted to do nothing but somehow throw him to the ground and stomp on his face. Or toss him out of the moving car. "Don't worry. She's right where she's supposed to be."

He sounded so proud of himself, even though it hadn't even been his idea. After they froze Bumblebee and handcuffed the two of us, one of the other agents (scientists?) that came with the second wave of Sector Seven operatives (and who happened to be driving the very car I was in) suggested me and Mikaela should be separated, so they put us in different vans. Mom and Dad (and Mojo) stayed together, but even they got a third van instead of sharing one with either of us.

I hoped she was okay. That they were all okay, since I _knew_ Bumblebee wasn't, and _one_ person getting essentially tortured (_abducted for experimentation_) because of me was already one person too many.

And it _was_ because of me. How stupid could I be anyway? Me and Mikaela had the nerve to handcuff all the agents to the bridge supports, even force Simmons to undress as vengeance, but didn't even think to search their pockets and relieve them of their cellphones? Really?

I hated this. I hated it so badly. My total inability to think on my feet. The only thing I ever manage to do under adrenaline is run, or babble like an idiot when that's not an option. Anything else, and my brain locks up. After the fact, I manage to come up with dozens of ways things could have turned out in my favor, but that only serves to highlight that I'm only ever an incompetent when it really matters. I failed to make the football team because of it (as Trent always likes to taunt me about) and when Barricade attacked us, I couldn't do jack when that – let's face it – _tiny_ 'con jumped at me. Mikaela was amazing by comparison, quickly finding that saw and cutting its head off.

All I _did_ manage was to get Mikaela to sit in my lap for a while, during the ride Bumblebee gave us, and even then she was only humoring me. And I owe having her along to Bumblebee for chasing me across town and drawing her attention when I was thrown head over heels after crashing my mom's bike in front of her and her friends.

I wanted to resent grandpa Archibald for finding Megatron and getting me indirectly involved in this mess, but I couldn't anymore. At least not for that specifically, not after he went blind and insane because of everything. Now I was wondering about something else, like if the brain damage he suffered could have somehow transmitted, jumped a generation even, and latched onto me. When I rambled to Trent about a link between brain damage and football, it was just another case of me going stupid at the worst of times, but that's just it: it always happens, and never seems to get better. All that "experience" that people supposedly acquire after successes and failures, I never seem to get any of it, despite everything I go through. I never seem to get any _better_.

I jerked in my seat as something smacked me on the forehead. My attention snapped back to the present and I realized Simmons had just hit me with his "do anything and get away with it badge." All of a sudden, I had to smother the irrational urge to laugh hysterically. It was the next-to-last drop in a pool of absurdity threatening to spill. "I asked you something, kid!" Simmons hissed.

I wished my hands weren't cuffed behind my back, just so I could poke him in the eyes. Deciding to ignore him until the interrogation became physically painful (though I hoped it wouldn't, but who knew with these guys?) I looked past him, and my sight landed on the rear-view mirror.

The driver was looking at me. The guy who'd suggested me and Mikaela be separated was looking right at me through that mirror. He was the only other person in the van with us, and I wondered how he still qualified for field work. He looked _ancient_. Well, not ancient, but still in his mid-forties, with dark greying hair and faint age lines on his forehead, and the corners of his black eyes. He was clean-shaven, and he had fewer wrinkles than my grandpa did at that age, but then again everyone did.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to transmit my displeasure with him without breaking silence, but I don't know if it worked.

Much to my surprise, the attempted interrogation didn't last much longer. Maybe because even Simmons didn't have much steam left after Bumblebee lubricated all over him. If we ever got out of this, I'd have to talk to him about not doing that, since the human equivalent is demeaning and gross enough that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Even more surprising, though, was that I actually dozed off at some point. Maybe it was because there was no one within my actual _sight_ to worry over, or because everything (from being tossed around by Decepticons to meeting benevolent aliens) finally caught up with me, but I actually fell asleep.

I must not have slept for long, though, because by the time I was violently snapped out of it by the van sharply swerving as though trying and failing to avoid an accident, I hadn't managed to have any nightmares.

I almost fell off the seat I was in when I finally woke up fully, but didn't have time to do more than yelp before getting knocked around again. "What's happening?!" Simmons shouted, wildly looking around before realizing that only the driver could possibly answer him. "Is it the NBEs again?"

"Unconfirmed sir!" The driver answered, surprisingly calm for the situation, though his voice did seem strained. "None of the other teams are responding- hold on!"

To _what?!_

The van swerved, avoiding one of the other vans that had inexplicably come to a halt in the middle of the road. Again. Not bad driving for an old man. Still, this time I did slip off the seat when the car stabilized. I groaned when I hit the car mat but no one paid attention to me.

Simmons had somehow managed to crawl to the passenger seat up front (how weird that these vans didn't have the front section cut off from the rest). "This is Seymour Simmons!" He shouted in the radio. "All teams report in!" Static, then garbled exclamations on top of each other. "One at a time!"

The voices were either tight or weak, as if people were giving their last breath. "Just… knocked out-" "-gas-" "-coming through the ventilation systems-!"

"What?" Simmons yelled. I couldn't see what look he had on from where I'd fallen on the car floor, but he sounded frightened. "Long-range comms are offline? What about those in the air!? The helicopters-"

"You sent them back to base earlier because they were either suffering a sensor malfunction or needed a refuel," the driver answered.

"Damn! I knew that!" Simmons tried to hedge. "I meant replacements!"

"You never demanded any, sir."

"I know!" Simmons was panicked, no doubt thinking Optimus and the others had come back. I honestly hoped they had, even if it _was_ just to free Bumblebee.

Then I heard it, in the lull of the night after the car finally came to a stop. The air hissing through the front vents, and the vents lining the top of the rear section. Even though my adrenaline had long since spiked, this was one occasion where I actually managed to understand what was going on. Somehow, some sort of sleeping gas was seeping into the car, the same one that had knocked out the people in the others. So far it sounded like accidents had been averted, but why and how was it happening?

I tried to force myself up, but the way I'd fallen only let me twist to the side, lying on my right shoulder. By the rushed scrambling in the front of the van, I could only assume they were trying to shut it down or- "Where are those gas masks?" Simmons wheezed. "They should be here!"

"I'll check the back!" the driver quickly slipped through the space between the seats, _over_ me and opened a container built into the panel beneath one of the side windows on the left. I couldn't see what he was doing, even after I twisted around to watch, but I got my answer when a whole bunch of gas masks fell right in front of me.

And the old-looking driver collapsed all over the wide seat I was no longer on, as though the gas was pulling him under. "Here!" He wheezed, putting on a mask and tossing another at the front. Simmons managed to catch it, barely, and pulled it over his face.

It seemed to work, but only for a moment. Simmons, despite having folded in the front seat and affixing the mask to his face as well as he could, collapsed completely. I couldn't see him, since I'd turned around in all the confusion, but I heard him mumble something. Also, in front of and above me the driver seemed to lose consciousness.

And just when I began to feel a heavy scent reaching my own nostrils, the driver pulled his mask off. His eyes were fully alert. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a pair of different face masks, like the ones doctors and nurses always seem to have on. One of them he used to cover his own mouth and nose, and the other he reached down and pressed against _mine_.

A pungent smell assaulted me, and it chased away the drowsiness that I hadn't even felt creeping over my senses. I stared at him in bewilderment as he pulled the string over my head, fixing the thing in place. My shock was only tempered by how I finally stopped holding my breath (I hadn't, until that point, realized I had stopped breathing).

We stayed that way, just staring. Well, _I_ was staring, he was eyeing the front, to make sure, I think, that Simmons had been knocked out. When the creep was well and truly out of it, the man gracefully pushed himself up, stepped over me again and, even as the mask was still on his face, spoke. "Terminate Protocol Bad Breath."

I couldn't help it. I laughed. Not a lot, just a startled squeak or two, but still, this was too much absurdity in a day.

Once I'd calmed down, I noticed the old man didn't have his mask on anymore. Checking Simmons' pulse and presumably finding it within acceptable parameters, he climbed back to the rear of the van and helped me back to the sideseat, taking my mask off as he did. I would have struggled if I didn't already know it was a lost cause.

Not troubled by my wariness, the driver calmly returned to the front and picked up the radio. "This is agent 'Old Dog,' all teams come in." No answer. "Excellent." I could only stare stupidly as the middle-aged man once again came to the back, his black suit completely unruffled despite everything that had happened during the past five minutes. He casually took a seat across from where I'd fallen back in mine. Then he just stared at me.

I would have been concerned about dishonorable intentions that old men would have towards kids if I'd have still considered myself a kid or if I hadn't just seen him deliberately keep me awake. As it was, I did only what I could: looked back at him, my face guarded. I'd only know what I was in for when he spoke.

"This makes no sense."

Or not.

I jumped, and realized I couldn't do anything other than the obvious. "What doesn't?" I asked.

The man waved his hand, trying to transmit a meaning I wasn't getting. "This. Everything!"

"Uh…" I briefly glanced around but nope, nothing had changed other than what he'd done himself. "I thought it was _you_ who'd basically sabotaged everyone? For whatever reason…"

The Old Dog snorted. "Not that, kid. Obviously, that was me. I mean _you_ don't make sense. You basically didn't do much of anything. Most of it was your girlfriend or those robots. You just barely rode this entire mess by the seat of your pants. Sheer dumb luck and nothing else." Well, that was rude, but apparently he wasn't finished. "I keep trying to figure out _the reason_ but… there's no explanation for why you'd be such a… such a…"

Maybe it was everything that had happened. Maybe I was too tired, or maybe I was past caring. I heaved a resigned breath and gave him the word he was looking for. "Wimp?"

The man blinked. "I was going to say _dork_ but that works too."

A flash of annoyance. "Yes, well I've done my best to keep my opinions to myself so I'll thank you for doing the same!"

The man blinked again, as though he couldn't understand why I'd take that poorly. "Well pardon me for trying to deliver a compliment."

"A compliment," I deadpanned.

"Yes, kid, a compliment. Obviously, if I can't understand _why_ you'd qualify as a dork after such a short amount of time we spent in each other's presence, then _clearly_ what I mean is that you have the markings of one who should be everything _but_."

He had officially lost me, although I appreciated the thought? "O…kay?" A flat look. Was he waiting for me to say something? A follow up to the conversation? My glance towards the front showed that Simmons was still there and living, although unconscious, and since I didn't know how long the gas would work, I figured I probably shouldn't stall things too much. "Markings?"

The old dog snorted and leaned forward, but did nothing further. He just looked closely, his eyes roaming up and down my person as though evaluating something for defects. I wouldn't go so far as to say I felt like a piece of meat, but the behavior did seem much like that of art critics while studying a sculpture or painting. "I mean your heart, boy. It's shining like a strobe light."

Right. He was crazy. Or he was speaking in code.

He gave me a long look. "You really have no idea what I'm talking about do you? No clue at all." His eyes sharpened – I could see it because he was so near – and his posture straightened. "Is there anything unusual about me that you can see?"

Other than how he acted as though we were in a café instead of a hijacked government van whose real owner had just been put under? "No?" What _was_ I supposed to say? Honestly!

"Hmm." He pinned me with that unwavering gaze of his, and I felt like something was crawling all over me, like ants. Or like a stream of warm water flowing _through _me. It was distracting and alarmingly pleasant, enough so that I didn't stiffen when he slowly raised his right arm, extending his hand forward towards my sternum. I didn't know what he was reaching out for, and I hoped it wasn't anything vital inside my rib cage, but when he spun his wrist as though undoing a latch, I felt something _vibrate_ in my chest, and then came _light_.

When I looked down, I was so startled that I cried out, pushed back in my seat, widening my eyes in fear, but no discomfort or pain came. Eventually, I had to blink, and when I did I and the apparition didn't vanish I had no strength to look at anything other than the white vortex of light right above my torso. It was… beautiful. Wonderful. A white flower with four petals, wide enough to cover my chest entirely.

I didn't even think about the man across from me anymore, but I heard him when he spoke. "No." My eyes finally tore from the wondrous sight and met his. And there was nothing reassuring in the sheer _confusion_ in them. "That can't be right."

"What did you do?" I asked, surprised by how awestruck my tone had become.

"Brought your spiritual axis to the visible spectrum."

Silence.

"Or that was the plan anyway," the man honestly seemed troubled as he rubbed his chin.

It worried me, for reasons I couldn't fathom. "What are you talking about?" I demanded. "I swear if you start spouting about meditating with my friend's New Age hippie mom, I'm taking my folks and girlfriend and leaving." The flower flared orange for an instant, but it cleared as soon as my irritation passed. "Who are you anyway?"

"By the Buddha, kids these days. Do them a favor and they'll gouge out your eyes," the middle-aged man shook his head and smiled ruefully when he pulled back. "Who am I? Just an old hermit whose days are numbered." I could only blink. And blink again. "And you know how we are. We like to spend our days in the _strangest_ ways. Fasting, praying, meditating on the meaning of life, and infiltrating secret governmental organizations in our spare time."

… The guy was serious. He was serious, and it was because of that that I could only gape dumbly at him. Wonderful sight I was, tainting the awe-inspiring presence of whatever that flower was by looking stupid.

"You know, the usual," he finished glibly.

There was silence as I took turns glancing from the totally immobilized Agent Simmons to the Hermit and back. I honestly don't know why it didn't hit me until then, but the magnitude of what had happened finally dawned on me. Protocol Bad Breath… it was something that had been set up beforehand, and Simmons, the so-called head of S7, didn't know about it, which meant that this old dude had somehow rigged all the cars himself over a long period of time… And the long-range communications not working… and the "fuel malfunction" of the helicopters, that must have been all him too.

It must have taken years of setting up sabotage on top of sabotage for whenever he felt he'd need it.

He was insane. He had to be.

"I am not insane," the man guessed my thoughts, though I doubt it took that big a leap of logic to know what was going on in my head. "And I can prove it, if you can promise not to freak out once the light show starts."

That sounded ominous, but despite knowing I might regret it, I still asked. "What light show?"

The man let his hands rest on his thighs, palms facing up on top of one another, closed his eyes and _hummed_. But it wasn't a _voiced_ hum, but a note that came from him and elsewhere at the same time. A note that traveled _through_ the world, that lasted well beyond the capacity of any human lungs. It was transcendent sonancy at its most basic, yet it completely overturned my world without me even understanding why. I listened, mesmerized, and could only stare as seven spirals of light flared in order, from the base of his spine to the top of his head. Like flowers, with incremental numbers of petals. Colored various colors. White, violet, purple with flecks of gold, pink, blue, green and golden yellow for the top, like a crown with countless petals. "So tell me. Do you see anything unusual about me _now_?"

As abruptly as it started, it ended, leaving me utterly stunned.

"_That_," the man said, "is the axis that _should_ have appeared on you just a short time ago, although probably colored differently. The problem is that it didn't."

"Problem?" God, I _squeaked_ again. I hate my voice. It betrays me at the worst of times. "You mean there's something wrong with me?"

Sadly, the S7 agent wasn't going to just reassure me that everything was fine and dandy. "It's not really an axis. It's a set of seven energy centers that keep the four bodies of man connected. The problem is that you only have one out of seven flowers or it looks like it but it can't be true because if it was you wouldn't be alive. You'd never have been successfully _conceived_."

My mind refused to dwell on the theory that my existence could be a _mistake_ so it latched on the other half of the sentence. "Four bodies? What bodies?"

"Well, humans _are_ three out of four parts _insubstantial_. The etheric, mental (pyschic) and emotional (or astral) bodies are tied to each other and the physical one by the seven-vortex axis. Hindu metaphysical and tantric/yogic traditions describe them best. See, they-"

"Right, nevermind that!" I waved frantically, trying to get him to stop what would probably turn into an unending philosophical lecture that would kill whatever time we still had before all the Sector Seven goons woke up. "Just tell me! What's wrong with me?"

"…"

I was thankful he didn't say anything, because I was too busy staring slack-jawed at my hands. My _free_ hands which I'd just started waving about like a madman. Hesitantly, I shifted on the wide seat and looked behind me. Yep, there they were. The handcuffs that had somehow, mysteriously come undone.

Slowly, I turned my head to behold the man, unwilling to believe what had just happened but unable to come up with any explanation other than the impossible.

The part of my brain still functional decided it was a good time to give the man the name "Hermit" and just get on with things.

"Okay," I took a deep breath. Two actually. "Okay. Go on. Hit me. What's this all about?"

"You have no intuition," was the blunt answer. "It's why you don't do well under pressure, and that's just scratching the surface, but it's the most direct path to the root of it." He raised his hand, reaching out for my chest again, and I stiffened despite myself. "Or perhaps _this_ is. You see, the four-flower petal is the root, the part that anchors the bodies together. And yours is not only too large for your physical body, it's also positioned _wrong_. It should be down there, near the base of the spine. The chest is where the _heart_ should be, and there should be two more vortices between it and the root, and three above it."

"…"

"That I can only see _one_ vortex, the _root_, yet you still live like everyone else can only mean that the other six exist and tie the other three bodies together, but not to the physical one. Somewhere along the way, an imbalance happened."

"Oh." I actually didn't understand even half of that, but it might have been because I was too concerned with my newfound tendency to trust everything Hermit was saying. What was wrong with me? I'd only just met him, and he'd only done some really crazy shit so far. "How can I believe any of this?" I had to ask. For my own sake if not his. "How do I know this isn't just some holographic technology?" I'd just seen Optimus use it to summarize Cybertron's history in immersive 3D, so my concern was totally justified.

He eyed me shrewdly. He knew my words were empty. "Is _seeing_ the only thing you've been doing since I made this appear?"

It wasn't. There were sensations that touched on all my other senses, and even some I didn't know I possessed. Touch, taste, smell and hearing seemed so _limited_ all of a sudden.

His hand was open, hovering in front and above that immaculate, brilliant flower. "May I?"

And for a moment, I wondered if I should say no. All my life I wanted to be normal. To experience normal education, normal friends and normal excitement, but everything that had happened this past week seemed to go against that, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't resent it. What made me so undeserving of experiencing what everyone else had? Why wasn't I equal to everyone else?

But then I figured that it all sounded suspiciously like I was asking "What did I do to deserve this?" and wasn't that a stupid thing to ask? By all accounts, this was as far from a bad thing as anything could possibly get. And wasn't it just an hour ago that I was beating myself up over failing Mikaela and failing Bumblebee? If there was even the slightest chance that this so-called hermit spy could help…

"What's in it for you?"

The man seemed surprised at my question. "Eh?"

"You. What's in it for you? Why would you help me?"

"Why not?"

My mouth moved, but no words came out, but I _had_ to say something. Anything. "What are you?"

Maybe that should have been the first thing I asked.

"A man."

He wasn't lying. Somehow I knew it. But the answer wasn't satisfying at all. A flash of resentment burned through me. Why the word games? Did he find this funny at my expense? Did he think it was amusing that, if he was right, something happened that messed me up before I was even born?

I saw the flower start to turn a horrid shade of puce, and I recoiled from the emotion.

Slowly, the color cleared, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

"You know, that's actually remarkable," Hermit said wonderingly, much to my surprise. He'd crossed his arms as he waited for me to reach a decision. "Normally, the root, all spirit anchors really, are tainted by the astral miasma, the emotional waste of the world as it were, the currents of misqualified energy, lamentable emotions of everyone living on Earth. The root is most vulnerable though, since it's a _root_, reaching deep and firmly into all four planes. Red is most common, associated with the desire for sex." I didn't flush in embarrassment. I _didn't_. "You, though, seem completely unaffected by those currents. It is a wonderful but also terrible trait."

"Wonderful? Terrible?" I parroted.

"Wonderful because it ensures total clarity, of purpose and direction. And of action. Or should, but in your case something is interfering. Terrible because it means you either lived enough lives to balance all your karma, or never had any to begin with, but chose to be born in this physical plane for a great purpose. And yes, I do mean _chose_. Contrary to what people think, we do choose how and where to be born. We just come without memories, because each life is a clean slate, free of the complexes and guilt, or attachments, of the previous life. Destiny is usually a broad goal we set for this life, with guidance from above. For most people, it's to balance, make up for, a certain share of the karma we have left. But those like you who _don't_ have Karma but embody anyway… It means you have Destiny in the grand sense. Destiny you still chose, but the type that affects many. These people can actually choose to recall past lives. That you don't have such recollections… well, I'm not sure what it means. You could be a new spirit I suppose, but you wouldn't have such a large root if that was the case."

I took a while to think about that, no longer caring that time was ticking away. This was _important_. "That doesn't explain why it's _terrible_."

"Because it means your existence will affect others on a grand scale regardless of how you live your life. And the more you waste your life, the worse things will go for those you chose to be born _for_. Because those who embody despite having no Karma of their own do it so they can shoulder that of others, or of entire people. The fate of cities, nations," he pinned my eyes with his, "races from planets far off."

Somehow, I felt that statement should have made me feel like I had the weight of the universe on my shoulders. It didn't. And I was glad, because I'd have probably had a panic attack that would have inevitably concluded with him calming me down but with so much time wasted that whatever was supposed to happen wouldn't have proceeded to completion properly.

And I _did_ think about what he said, and despite my lack of intuition I started to see connections. Things that were not what I would have done under regular circumstances but I, nonetheless, did anyway. Buying the Camaro despite how obvious, in hindsight, it was that it ruined the other cars. Knowing well enough to trust Bumblebee after Barricade's attack and getting in the car. Having the nerve to berate the Autobots, berate _Optimus bloody Prime,_ for ruining dad's lawn and smashing my mom's flowers and the fountain. Despite bowing down to Trent's bullying (unless my mouth started running), I somehow had the nerve to scold a three stories-tall alien robot from a distant galaxy.

God. I really was _not_ normal, was I?

"Was this planned?"

I don't know where the question came from, but Hermit didn't seem too surprised I asked it. "This meeting of ours? Not by me. The most I can claim to have contributed to this confrontation is that I intuitively felt I should be part of the convoy of S7 reinforcements earlier today. Anyone else who may have had a hand in this I can safely say do not have some grand scheme they intend to manipulate or force us into. Ultimately, the goal of those beyond this plane is to ensure potential can be realized, unfettered, for everyone. Nothing more, nothing less."

The vortex in front of my chest flashed a dark orange for a moment, and I suspected it was my faint anger showing. "Will you stop being so deliberately vague?"

Hermit looked apologetic. "I'm not being deliberately vague. It's just… words will never really be enough to share all the information you want, so I try to speak in words that allow for more _meaning_ to seep through. That you don't 'get it' is because you don't have intuition. And I'm sorry but I have free will as much as you do and it's my choice to try and transmit as much as possible. We don't exactly have a lot of time here."

I stared at him in disbelief. I'd just complained about him holding things _back_ and he was saying he was doing the _opposite_ of that… Was it really just me taking it all wrong? "So…" I started carefully. How should I phrase this? Is God real? Do angels exist? You're saying that you can run into those tentacly energy beings from Stargate if you squint hard enough? "Those beyond this plane?"

He smiled, an oddly approving one, praise-filled even. Praise for me having enough guts to ask the question. "You didn't _really_ think that Primus, who gave just _one_ planet life, was the One God of the entire Cosmos, did you?"

So _that_ was the name of the AllSpark's creator. Come to think of it, Ironhide swore by him a lot while I was looking for my grandfather's glasses.

If anyone asked me before if I was a spiritual man, I'd have probably said no. Unless I wanted their approval, in which case my mouth would probably start running like usual and ensure I made a fool of myself and failed to gain their approval anyway.

Now, though…

The man extended his hand again, hovering above that flower. "May I?"

With a deep breath, I nodded. May as well get it over with.

Hermit closed his eyes and focused, and I felt… something pass through me. Like the thrum of a really powerful subwoofer, but that was it. Then a second, and a third, and it seemed to be reaching farther from me each time. But when I saw the confused, almost frustrated frown on the older man's face, I knew something wasn't going as planned.

I got my confirmation when his eyes snapped open and he looked more worried than I'd ever seen anyone. He kept staring at where the white flower was no longer visible. "We'll need to go outside for this." And without further ado, he pushed the car door open and held it for me to follow.

Which I did. What else could I have done?

I couldn't stop myself from looking around, trying to spot the platform trailer Bumblebee had been strapped to, but I didn't see it anywhere. My heart sank at the realization, but it was pretty dark, despite the half-moon and stars, and there were no streetlights on the highway, so he was probably a bit farther down the road.

I followed Hermit to where he'd stopped a dozen paces or so away from the van. "Okay, what's going on?" I demanded.

"What's going on is that your three insubstantial bodies are out of whack." He gestured almost helplessly, and I realized with alarming concern that he was out of his depth. "They should be concentric spheres, with you smack-dab in the middle, but the signals I'm getting paint them as anything but. I'm going to try and increase the wavelength of their passive emissions for a while, bringing them into the visible spectrum temporarily. Hopefully that will tell me what's so strange about you and why."

"Oh." Once again I didn't understand much, but I think the core of it got through. "Okay."

He held his hand out, palm spread over the space in front of my chest, then he lifted it as if stroking a curtain.

A _wave_ washed over me, from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head, then went higher and higher. I don't know how I felt it, maybe it was because it was still_ me_ that the wave was passing through, but I could tell it reached about seven or eight meters up. Then it settled and began to radiate outwards, and as the white flower appeared again, so did the other six, one by one, only instead of being anchored to my body they were in the air, each above the rest.

And then the rest of me came into view, like concentrated fog that became translucent glass, and I could do nothing but stare. That was no sphere. That was no standard geometric shape.

I felt like I'd been dumped in an icy lake. This couldn't be happening. It just _couldn't_.

"… Well." Hermit said after a while, gazing in sheer surprise up at… me. The me all the way up there. And around me. "This is new."

"What?" I screeched, and my psychic/etheric/astral all-in-one self _vibrated_ with my disbelief. "That's all you can say! What is wrong with you?!"

"With me? Don't change the focus of this exchange of experiences, kid."

"Exchange of…!" I breathed in and out. Standard procedure when trying to force back an emerging panic attack. "This… this isn't a prank right? You're not just shitting me here, right?"

"I'd have to devour you first before I could do that."

"Augh!" I threw my hands in the air and smothered the urge to pace, because if that huge, robot hologram started to walk along with me, I'm not sure what I'd do. "I'm a robot! A bloody robot!"

"That's the form your insubstantial bodies have taken, yes. Seems they had to merge in order to create something cohesive enough to maintain the integrity of that blue sun. Congratulations. You've already covered three quarters of the road to Ascension!"

"Stop joking!" I shrieked again. God, I hated my voice for always cracking under stress, did I mention that yet? "This is serious!"

"Apologies, but it is fascinating, and not just to me." There was actual awe in his voice as he craned his neck to look at that star. That blue spark – I had a bloody _spark_ – that hovered in front of the pink, twelve-petaled vortex of my heart.

His tone actually gave me pause, and I finally realized that he wasn't worried at all. I grabbed that confidence and kept a hold of it, bringing down the throbbing of my racing blood pump. Hesitantly, I took a step forward, and when the representation of the rest of my _self_ stayed put, I forced my feet to take me over to where Hermit was.

And when I was there, I turned around and looked at what was supposedly the rest of me. It was a humongous thing, like a translucent hologram of – holy _shit_ – an Autobot. An autonomous robotic organism from the planet Cybertron. The shape wasn't completely consolidated, and it didn't remind me of any particular vehicle, but it also didn't seem complete yet. There were flowing edges, where gossamer strands seemed to still be weaving together, and the center of the chest was… the flower was more like a wormhole that spiraled outward and forward, maintaining a sort of containment field around my… my spark.

The missing six vortices were all there, I noticed. The violet and orange ones between the root and pink heart (what do you know, pink really is the color of love), and even the blue, green and gold above it, each with a myriad more petals than the last.

All of a sudden, a different strand materialized, coming straight from the center of the spark. It was white in color. Hermit grabbed a hold of it and saw my _history_. "The spark wasn't always that large. It started out smaller, small enough that it fit in the secret chamber of the heart. But it integrated the threefold flame, the expression of divine love, wisdom and will that all humans have. It _became_ the secret chamber itself. It became your identity, so I guess we could say your _identity_, _you,_ were birthed by something else in addition to the divine source of me or anyone else on this planet. That spark is something made to assimilate your entire immaterial being, your soul, mental and emotional bodies all in one. But it wasn't _made_ for humans. The structure was different, made for physical and metaphysical beings of a different sort."

"Mechs," I guessed. Not that there was much room for other theories.

He nodded. "Of a mystically aware sort most likely. So because you had no physical means to sustain the spark, your mental and emotional bodies adjusted on their own, based on the image your spark had, since they can only ever outpicture _you_, and the spark _is_ you so to speak_._ But as they grew and merged, they left your body unable to keep up. Had you had access to the proper teachings and nutrients, your physical self might have progressed well enough to prevent this disparity between concept and reality, but that's not the case. So as the wavelength and size of your immaterial self progressed, the imbalance with your physical one became too sharp, and caused a schism. Your brain didn't receive anything from above anymore. Given that, it's astonishing you can actually function relatively normally. Your brain actually evolved significantly to be able to make up for the lack of intuition and ideas. Somehow it subconsciously permutes all possibilities available to you and provides the best it can find in order to fulfill your purpose of a normal life. Because in absence of intuition, you subconsciously realized you couldn't hope for anything better."

I felt distinctly ill at the revelation. I was spiritually handicapped. Literally.

"This also explains your inability to do anything properly under pressure but run." Wait, it did? "You can't intuitively decide on the fly how to deal with tough situations, so your brain floods you with all the possibly worthwhile ideas it can think of, so you end up babbling or succumbing to the only thing that can overrule your mind, namely the fight of flight instinct. And since we've already established your, sorry to say it, sub-par physical condition when it comes to anything other than speed, well…"

"Fighting would never cross my mind." I succumbed to the urge to rub my forehead. Holy crap, I was messed up bad. "And you're saying I chose this?"

"Not this outcome exactly," he hedged. "But to… take? Accept the spark? Wherever it came from? I honestly do not know. There was some choice involved, I can assure you of that. Otherwise the ones above would have interfered. Of the same divine source or not, you're still of_ us_, like everyone else with sentience. We'd not just leave you to fend for yourself. From what I can gather, the spark –don't ask me why it appeared or from where – was bonded to you after your initial creation, so I _can_ say that you didn't exactly lose anything. Your spark may have engulfed the flame, but it did not replace it, and everything else of you did come from wherever I did. And look." He pointed at the violet vortex between the root and the solar plexus. "The white sphere in there. That is the _soul_. You have both a soul _and_ a spark. It's really amazing. Whoever did this could only have sought what they saw as best. It just didn't all go as well as it could have."

"So…" I was afraid to ask, but I had to. "Am I still human?" And to think that so short a time ago I was ashamed of that race.

"Oh, you're fully human," the hermit spy said immediately. "You're just not _only_ human."

From there, we both just continued to look at… me I guess. The blue-white hue of the robotic figure would glimmer at certain intervals, and the spark, as wide as I was tall, gave off solar winds. It genuinely looked like a blue sun, even held in that makeshift forcefield projected by my heart. It looked so majestic. Too majestic for someone like me. I wondered… had it kept evolving as it did, would it have broken off from me along with my higher self and taken a life of its own? Would I have become the world's first human without a soul, or anything to look forward to after death? Could life as limited and flawed as that even exist?

Would the world have suffered me? I suppose with my talents in running away I could have become a decent enough messenger but…

"I have upset you."

No shit, Sherlock! I almost snapped at him – it looks like I only ever have the guts to do it to people who want to help me – but the root flower was right in front of me and the dirty blue that had tainted it (the blue of my _depression_) flared with such noxious, black flecks that I recoiled from the emotion again.

I wondered… if people could _see_ how ugly these negative emotions made us, would we, as a race, actually act differently? Would we change enough to deserve the goodwill we keep being shown?

The intensity of my _heart's_ light faltered, and the containment field around that spark wavered for an instant.

I looked at the strange man, silently requesting an explanation, but got none. I took that to mean that if I had any intuition to speak of, I'd understand on my own.

But I still didn't think I could bring myself to agree, so I did what any normal teenager would do. I procrastinated. "What's that?" I pointed at the white string spiraling all around my psychic self, the string he'd grabbed in order to _read_ me.

"Life thread," he said. "The one that chronicles your _self_. And these," he waved a hand, and a myriad of other strings, silver-colored, appeared, all heading outward, like the pins on a hedgehog. Only they meandered, wisped around and through each other, but all intersected in the same spot in the center of my heart. I noticed that eight of them were thicker and brighter than the rest, and five of those seemed to be made of _words_. Symbols like… like the ones the AllSpark had all over it in Optimus' retelling. "These are fate threads. Each one connects to someone with a direct stake in your life, and branches out and links to those that can affect you through association with the one on that end."

I saw a look of thought cross his face, before he grinned and reached out for one.

Of the five that tied me to the Autobots, one bent, extended and glided over towards us, so that it was within arm's reach. And when it was close enough, the crazy hermit spy grabbed hold of it and _pulled_.

I gave a gasp of alarm when a section ripped, but calmed down when the halves of the thread reconnected as though they'd never been severed. But the small piece that had been torn off was still in Hermit's grasp. "Watch." With a flick of his finger, it formed into a loop which he began to manipulate as if playing cat's cradle. And when it was somehow stretched and curled on itself, again and again, looking like a ball with countless intertwined points, he pulled it outward.

The sphere washed over us both. It practically exploded, overtaking us and everything else, the car convoy, the whole street. Something like fog and flames flickered over it, engulfed it, engulfed _us _and then we were standing outside what could only be a human home, with a swimming pool taking up half the back yard.

Over the next few minutes, I was treated to a clear view of a meteor crashing down from the heavens… right into the swimming pool. And the time it took for Ironhide to get his bearings was all a little girl needed to creep out of the house and get a perfect view of the Autobot climbing out and stepping over her, utterly failing to be inconspicuous.

But the grand prize went to the little girl when she blandly asked "Are you the Tooth Fairy?"

What happened next wasn't Ironhide's fault. Really! Or anything that happened, exactly. It's just that after finally getting beyond the bearable level of absurdity earlier when I heard about Protocol Bad Breath, I just couldn't help it.

I fell on all fours and started to laugh hysterically. And I couldn't get up or even look up from there. Not when the vision ended, not when all noise other than my laughter stopped, not when my _ghost_ faded from view. And not when I collapsed the rest of the way, still laughing even though I was on my back by that point. And with my eyes shut I didn't even get to enjoy the view of the night sky.

"And _that_," the Hermit said, distinctly pleased with himself. "Is called _scrying_."

Had to hand it to him, the guy knew how to sell his merchandise.

Sometime later, I finally ran out of energy and my hysterics tapered off. I was lying on the road, gasping for breath. I almost expected my parents or Mikaela, maybe Bumblebee to be hovering worriedly over me when I opened my eyes to find the past day had been just a bad dream, but it was still just me and the old guy out in the middle of nowhere.

A while later, I was finally standing again, and by the serious look on the agent's face, I knew I couldn't stall anymore.

Not that I needed it. I'd already decided what my answer would be. Even if I didn't gain any magical powers (that sounded stupid even in my head), if this was actually going to let me stop being such a loser, if it meant I could actually do something that _mattered_, there really was no dilemma to speak of. "Can you really fix me?" I hated how plaintive and vulnerable I sounded, but scrap it all there was no one there to witness it, so there!

"Not really - " I felt like the world was about to crash down on me – "But I can intercede for those that can."

I almost yelled at him for joking about this, but his expression made me bite back my heated words. Somehow, with a clarity I didn't possess before, I realize he really had only answered my question. He just didn't want to lie, so he said it that way, even though it pushed all my wrong buttons.

"… Will it hurt any worse than getting thrown around by big robots?"

His gaze became distant for a second. "Apparently, it won't hurt in the least. Although your physical body may go through some changes. Nothing outwardly obvious though. But honestly, are you going to waver at this stage because of a minor worry like _that_?"

I wondered on what planet anatomic changes under no anesthetic were considered minor, but stopped myself because time would just be wasted on such a discussion. Besides, he'd implied I was chicken, and Sam Witwicky definitely was not! "Fine," I said, sounding braver than I felt. "What do I have to do?"

Hermit cracked his neck a few times and rotated his shoulders, as if to loosen them. "Just be sincere in your acceptance." He raised his hands, until his palms were at shoulder level, facing me.

Still wary but somehow insane enough to trust my life into the hands of a virtual stranger (who knew, maybe my intuition was already working? Erm… backwards in time?) I lifted my hands, and let him intertwine his fingers with mine.

"I know it doesn't usually work when people say it, but I need you to relax."

I tried, I really did, but my heart just kept beating faster and faster.

And then that strong, serene note _hummed_ again, and tension flowed out of me so quickly it may as well have just been my imagination. I felt like nothing could possibly harm me anymore. Not while that note still sang.

"Easy now, young one," It wasn't Hermit speaking at that point. The countenance was grander, and his eyes shone _green_. In entirety, not just the iris. Like green flames, they _blazed_ and did not worry me at all. "Do not fear what comes."

And for some reason, I didn't. I let him (let _Them_)spread our arms wide, and I leaned my head forward, letting our bodies press together and his (Their) forehead rest on mine. And before what was coming started, I mused distractedly that I didn't even have the slightest idea which religion's gods I was about to come into contact with.

Gentle, patient amusement _breezed _through me and I got my answer. _All of them_.

As far as the rest of the world was concerned, it was over in just under a minute.

For me, it was enough time to live through the birth of a universe and experience my life all over again. Something passed through my four bodies, diffused them, removed their shape, returned them to their natural, spherical state, from before they'd been warped by an identity I'd assumed but failed to live up to. The spark contracted – no – my _mind_ expanded, my immaterial self grew even as the spark became smaller, yet none of those parts of me ever really changed, because size was relative and, at that level, it didn't really _matter_.

My spirit axis moved, contracted. My spark settled perfectly in the secret chamber of the heart, and then all the seven anchors that were supposed to hold me together finally bound my four components properly. They flared on me, from the base of the spine to the top of my head, and interposed, coincided with those of the person acting as channel for my healing.

In one, eternal moment, I experienced _everything_.

Then it felt like I was being wrung in all directions, as if ants were crawling beneath my skin and through my bones. And as bizarre as it felt, it fell short of being uncomfortable. For the first time, I was in perfect sync with three parts of myself I never realized I'd lost contact with, and I could feel my physical shell _change_. My insides were shifting, my lungs had stopped working but that was okay because whatever was happening was taking care to cycle air through them anyway, giving them all the time they needed to do what they had to do.

Through it all, the only thing that came close to being disconcerting was how my head felt. How I relived my entire life in reverse, with startling clarity. And with each scene that flashed before my eyes, each memory as perfect as the day those things happened, I could feel my mind becoming lighter. Clearer. _Emptier_ but in no way _bad_. As if I was offloading the memories, as if I was shedding all the bad but necessary habits my conscious and unconscious mind had acquired over the years because it had no other choice in absence of the rest of me.

Things got decidedly weird, though, when my recollections went past the two year-old mark and I relived my toddler-hood, and even the very early days, up to and including last three months when I was still in my mother's womb.

I would have reacted, _somehow_, but all of a sudden, no memories remained. For an instant, I knew nothing. Not who I was, not even that I was supposed to _be_ someone.

But then everything snapped into place, and for the first time in my life I felt _whole_. Just before those beings, gods or not, retreated from me, I felt completely in tune with the rest of the universe. I knew myself and I knew _Them_.

And I _remembered_ that allowing this disparity had been my _choice_. Because if I had been in any way remarkable during my early life, I would not have been left alone to make my way like any other prodigious youth. Not with my grandfather's history with Sector Seven. The government would have been all over me in a blink, suspecting alien involvement or repercussions, and who knows where and how I would have ended up?

Then it passed, but while the communion with the entirety of creation ended, I realized I could still feel much. I knew where everything was within several hundred meters' radius. Where all four vans were, where my parents were sleeping, where Mikaela was unconscious in the van nearest to the side of the road, still handcuffed but otherwise fine. Her purse was squashed inside a side compartment of the van, placed there by the agents, preventing a certain fake phone from doing anything other than wait.

I even felt where Bumblebee was strapped to that horrid trailer, still on ice – because despite that the four men traveling with him had been knocked out somehow, the trailer had been _made_ to hold transformers, and could maintain the liquid nitrogen flow on its own.

Then even that awareness left me, but despite how much _less_ than before it was, I could finally, honestly say, for the first time in my life without it being a lie, that I felt completely fine.

Unfortunately, that only made one of us.

Henry – I knew his name now, that much had been revealed to me during our meeting of _spirit_ – tipped forward and I almost collapsed under his weight. Somehow, though, I managed to lower him to the ground. Let him kneel and hang all over me anyway. His breathing wasn't labored, but it was shallow in another way. Like his body couldn't muster enough energy to work his ribcage to the desired extent.

"Oh shit!" I, of course, became alarmed. "Oh shit, oh shit!" Oh shit! It never even crossed my mind that doing this for me might incur a price!

"It's not a price," he mumbled from where his forehead leaned into my shoulder. "It's just… You know, an antenna doesn't really catch a good signal, or send it, if it's made with too many impurities." He pushed himself back until he was sitting on the ground, supporting part of his weight with his hands. "I spent practically my entire life purifying my bodies, but it's hard to do it fully for the physical one when all the food you can find is at least 25% made of crap."

I blinked in shock. For some reason, I didn't expect him to be so crass, even though he'd hardly been all zen-like during our dealings. I kept my mouth shut, though, as I knelt in front of him.

"And when beings so pure make contact with you, they do us the favor of burning away all the bullshit. But you can't light a candle without burning the thread. Unfortunately, my body is still kind of used to living off the crap that likes to interfere with communions like this, and when the crap disappears, It makes me feel great, a lot more aware, a lot more at peace, but also really weak since the makeshift fuel this old shell works on is mostly gone."

"Oh…" That… that kind of sucked. And seeing him looking so sallow… it wasn't awesome. "I'm sorry."

He blinked and shook his head. "I did say the benefits outweigh the bad. And it's my own fault, not theirs. Besides, it beats spontaneous combustion any day."

What? "What? That actually happens?"

"Sometimes, people at their final incarnation balance out their karma and don't have attachments, or responsibilities, left in this plane, so they decide to just move on. And since it's hard to assimilate only worthwhile substances over one's life, usually the whole body ends up burning to nothing when _fusion_ occurs, and they have to build a new one from the ground up, or they just decide to stay as pure energy in the higher planes. Or both."

God, this sounded so _fascinating_. I never used the word before in my life, but damn! I had so many _questions_ now-

Henry tried to climb to his feet, but swayed. I moved forward to help him, and I pulled one of his arms over my shoulders. "Thanks kid," he murmured tiredly as I helped him up. "Think you can help me back to the van? The rear seat is fine. At least this way I won't have to play dead."

Wait a minute. What was he saying? Wait! What was _I_ saying!? Doing?! I still had to do something about mom and dad, and Mikaela. And Bumblebee! And Mojo!

"Oh Crap! What am I supposed to do now?"

Henry started chuckling weakly from where he was dragging his feet next to me. He glanced sideways at me, and I saw his eyes were back to their normal black, but more sunken in than before our communion. "You're the only sentient being here with free will that will still be self-aware four minutes from now, and you're asking _me_?"

I suppose in that context it really was a dumb question.

Paradoxically, that reaction of mine made me feel better than ever. Even after what I'd just gone through, I was still _me_. Just better. No, the word just didn't seem good. I was_ more_ than I was.

I walked Henry to the van, then helped him settle and watched as he easily fell into slumber. I inwardly decided that I'd corner him for more talks later. For now, the main question was whether I should deal with a certain fake cellphone _first_, or leave it and everything else in my girlfriend's purse for last.

I turned to leave, but was surprised by a hand grabbing my wrist. "Samuel…" It was the first time he addressed be my name, and it made me stiffen. I looked back down to see him looking at me. "Give me a couple of days before you tell anyone about me, alright? And I don't mean Sector Seven, but your Autobot friends. And your parents and the girl."

I wasn't sure what to think about that request, but I could feel it was the least I could do for him. "I guess two days isn't too long to wait…"

"No," he said, and I somehow felt there was more meaning in his words than he let me see. "It's not much time at all."

Feeling something heavy pass over us with those words, I watched him drift off. Hoping to find more sense in what had happened, I tested my newfound intuition and tried to guess what it was all about.

Nope. Nothing.

Damn.

Feeling oddly cheated, I got out of the van and took a deep breath. I wasn't sure what to do next, but I knew how it would start, whatever it would be.

Remembering what I'd felt during that moment when I knew where everything and everyone was, I chose my direction and made a beeline for a certain, hellish platform trailer. Hopefully, by the time the rest of the Autobots caught up, I'd have come up with a plan.


	3. Arc I-3: Cute, Cuddly and Everything But

**A/N: **Not doing my chapterly reader response any favors by posting this so soon, but here we go. I guess I'm just really enthusiastic. :P

* * *

**Chapter 3: Cute, Cuddly and Everything But**

"-. .-"

Even with Bumblebee's emotional forewarning, what I found surprised me. And it was not only due to how the human vehicles were spread over the road as if they had been knocked around by Ratchet suffering an overload-by-power-lines. The tracks on the asphalt were expected also, and seeing the boy functional and even walking around brought an unexpected pang of relief to my spark, though it did not compare to the effect Bumblebee had on me. The sight of him standing under his own power, seemingly unharmed after his ordeal…

No, what gave me pause was the pile of handguns and other human-made weapons near the side of the road. And how the young human kept walking from the pile to every van and back, bringing along any other weapons he could find and dumping them unceremoniously on top of the others, thus steadily adding to the size of the pile. And he seemed to be gathering the cellular phones and other portable comm devices as well, in a smaller jumble next to the first. All of them with their batteries disconnected.

It made me feel foolish. How did we neglect to scan for those means of communication earlier? Sensor adjustment due to unfamiliar planetary conditions was no excuse for this. If we had relieved the humans of them, the second wave of government forces would not have been called and Bumblebee would not have been captured.

Ratchet transformed from ambulance to bipedal form before I did, and by the time I changed from my alt mode as well he was already running scans on my scout. Ironhide soon approached the yellow bot, laying a servo on his shoulder. By the looks of their optics, they were having a private conversation.

But Bumblebee's gaze did not stray from the small human for any extended interval. Beside me, Jazz leaned back on his heel struts and signaled me that he, too, had noticed it.

In all honesty, I could actually understand the young bot's concern. Bumblebee and the steadily growing gun and telephone piles were located near the trailer platform, and _that_ was right at the end of the convoy, and we had to drive around the vans to get to them. And through it all, Samuel Witwicky gave us barely a passing glance. I saw relief in it (and I was still amazed that he could trust us to this extent despite one of our own race trying to kill him less than two joors ago) but otherwise he paid us very little attention. He just waved at us as we passed him by on our way to Bumblebee and continued to practically loot the government vehicles.

"Ya know, I'm feelin' kind of ignored here," Jazz spoke next to me. After making sure our youngling was being well looked after, he had joined me in watching the boy. "Our novelty factor can't have disappeared already, right?" It had, apparently. To Samuel Witwicky in any case. It felt strangely reassuring to receive such easy-going treatment from a native, so soon after our arrival. "Scope it, boss bot, he's checking out their IDs."

It was true. Though the boy relieved everyone he could find of their weapons and means of communication, he took nothing else, except the wallets or whatever else they kept their papers in. And he always put those back where he found them after taking a look through their contents.

Ratchet had, of course, scanned two of the cars and their occupants on the way over, and he had also already studied the leftover gas. He found it to be a harmless airborne sedative. He also concluded that the humans would stay unconscious for at least another hour, so I did not need to rush any explanation out of the boy or my scout. For now I was content to wait until Ratchet concluded his examination of Bumblebee, or Samuel finished his plundering.

My shoulder pads almost shook with restrained amusement at that last thought.

Unsurprisingly, Ratchet had an update first. _:Bumblebee's systems are all green. But that raises questions of its own.:_

_:Such as?:_

_ :Such as why his scans of the boy produced __this__.:_ He sent me a data burst, and when I saw the virtual hologram forming in my HUD I had to admit that I, too, had no explanation for what I was seeing.

_:I suppose you will need to scan him yourself.:_

_ :No slag.:_

_ :I will bring it up with him.:_

It turned out that, if nothing else, whatever happened here gave the boy a better sense of timing, because he finished looting the convoy right as my conversation with Ratchet reached its end. Even then, however, he did not turn his attention to us. Instead, he stood there, next to the gun and phone piles, but facing one of the vans. The one van which, I belatedly noticed, he had not yet opened. He just stood in the light of one vehicle's still active car lights, with his left hand on his hip and his right rubbing his chin. Just _thinking_.

He had even put on a black trench coat at some point. No doubt taken off one of the agents. It was three or four sizes too big, making him look rather ridiculous. The same could be said of his serious face that was all too youthful for that frown he had on. I imagined the garment, at least, served to stave off the chilly wind well enough.

Walking over to him, I spoke. "Samuel Witwicky." He did not voice his surprise, but he did jump at the sound of my vocalizer. Had he really not noticed me? I did not take care to mask my footsteps, although I suppose the sound canceling technology in our axles does reduce the potential noise of our footfalls by a tremendous amount even at normal settings. "My scout informs me that you may know what has occurred here."

"Divine intervention." It was a flat, tired reply, tinted with a tiny amount of disbelief.

Disbelief that he was actually in a situation where those words fit, I somehow deduced. He did not even look at me when he gave that answer, and I honestly did not know what to make of it.

Perhaps realizing what he sounded like, he blinked and met my optics. "No seriously. That's what happened. Well, that and I realized that my family motto is complete crap, but then that goes for more than half of the supposedly 'wise' sayings and proverbs in the world. What do I call you anyway? I can't call you by name unless you give me permission, and I don't know if 'Prime' is your family name or a title. And calling you 'Big Bot' would be weird, do you guys even use nicknames? I have a feeling Big Buddha would fit to a T, but calling you that would feel like I was stealing the privilege of assigning you that designation from someone else. And no, I have no idea why I feel that way." He shook his head with a weak laugh, looking back at the van. "Man, intuition is so weird. Awesome, but weird."

I did not have any trouble processing that extended reply, but I did have to use four distinct processing threads to do it in a timely fashion. It was a first when dealing with these humans. The boy certainly could speak _fast_. Owing to our research into human behaviors I also realized that Samuel did not necessarily expect an answer to any, or _all_, of those questions, so I simply waited, using the reprieve to look up "Buddha" on the Internet.

Sam laughed at himself. "Man, before now I rambled like this whenever I was under pressure, but now I seem to be doing it when I'm _not_ under stress."

Appreciating the comparison to the revered historic figure I had finished researching, I knelt in front of him to try and allow us to speak on more or less equal standing. It did not work much better than the first time, as I only became three times taller than he was instead of five, but that did not seem make him uncomfortable at all. Then again, even when we first met he only seemed in awe of us, not fearful…

… At least until we ruined the area surrounding the home of his parental units. Then he threw off all inhibitions and outright ranted at us. Repeatedly. Though not quite to the extent Bumblebee did at Ironhide earlier.

I was going to pursue my initial point, but with almost no prompting my processors brought up the image of the children clinging to my shoulder and slipping, almost falling to a gruesome death into the rotors of the helicopters passing below the bridge I was hanging from. Then it changed to the two of them impacting hard against my pedes as they finally lost hold and fell. I felt a stab of guilt. They would have died painfully had it not been for Bumblebee, and even his catch could not have been painless. "Are you alright, Samuel?"

He smiled with a mix wonder – at my concern – and a ghost of patient exasperation – I knew not what for. "'Sam' is fine. And yeah, I'm okay. Nothing broken or torn, except my clothes." With a flash of insight, I wondered whether the trench coat was really there just to cover his rumpled clothing, or if it was meant to conceal the bruises inflicted by my rough handling of him. Then his expression changed to thoughtful and worried. His eyes passed to Bumblebee and then quickly back to meet my optics. "How are _you?_"

For an instant, I wondered just how much he saw.

I acknowledged his point as wordlessly as he'd made it. My optics switched between him and the yellow scout momentarily, much like his eyes had done previously. "Better now." Then it struck me that, ultimately, no matter _what_ had happened here, the simple fact was that it had returned Bumblebee to us. To _me_, fully functional, and without the loss of human life I had used as an excuse to leave him behind. "Thank you, boy." I truly meant it.

Sam grimaced. "Hate to disappoint you, but as much as I'd love to take the credit for all this," he waved his hand, indicating everything. "None of it was me."

I followed his gaze to the one van he had not plundered yet. Or even opened. "Ratched confirmed the use of an airborne toxin."

"Yeah, figured he would. Look, umm… What _should_ I call you?"

Prime would be most appropriate, and all my Autobots would no doubt agree. "Optimus is fine." Bumblebee's broken vocalizer whirred and clicked in surprise in the background, where he and the others had crowded around the two of us.

"Okay. Optimus then. I'm sorry, but I can't talk about what happened he-"

"Can't or won't?" Ironhide interrupted.

The boy _glared _at the mech with such audacity that I was surprised Ironhide did not bristle at "the nerve of the puny organic" as he would say. He _did_ bristle at what came next, however. "I'm assuming he's the senior and probably your oldest friend here, huh?" Sam asked me. "Otherwise he'd have probably been too self-conscious to just butt into _your _conversation like that. Especially since you're military."

Bumblebee ducked his head and beeped in embarrassment. Embarrassment for _Ironhide_.

Jazz, naturally, could not miss the chance to throw a friendly barb. "Kid's got ya pegged, Hide. Quick! Interrupt'em some more! I wanna see what else he can figure out!"

Ironhide cussed Jazz quite splendidly in Mechan, our native glossa, demonstrating his mastery of dirty language by transmitting no fewer than thirteen multi-phrase curses in a single, nine-second burst.

Sam, who had returned to facing me and was preparing to resume speaking, snapped his head in the direction of my two immediate subordinates so quickly that I saved a notification to have Ratchet check for whiplash in his medical scan of the boy. And to verify once more if our language produces any sound waves that can harm human hearing, or otherwise affect Earth's inhabitants negatively.

That had been an all too extreme reaction to what, in the end, were only vowel-intensive but ultimately unintelligible electronic noises and rumbles.

With a grimace, the boy met my optics again. "Right. Anyway. I can't talk about what happened here _yet_." I noted that Ironhide and Jazz had quieted once more. "I've been told to wait for two days. I'm sorry if it's not what you wanted to hear."

I did not have time to even process that before Bumblebee's vocalizer started to emit bursts of mismatched sounds and static. He flinched from the sensory overload of allowing his slip of composure to upset his damaged voice box. Ratchet had to pull him away from us to start meddling with the pain receptors in his throat, grumbling all the way about emotional younglings.

I pinged Bumblebee over a private connection, and he belatedly remembered to transmit his concerns that way.

The boy was looking worriedly at the scout when I focused on him once more. "Bumblebee is worried that you, as humans would say, are being blackmailed by whoever or whatever facilitated your release."

"Oh!" There was no indication that his surprise was fake. "No! No, this…" He waved his hands about. "This is all good. No third party or secret agenda. Well, nothing bad anyway. Look, I'm not explaining this properly." With a deep breath, he spoke again, more steadily. "I've been kindly asked, as a personal favor, to wait for at least two days before telling anyone what actually happened here. For their… safety. And, really, it's the least I can do."

"… Very well," I cycled air through my vents. "As long as you can at least assure me that Decepticons were not involved."

"Oh! _Them!_ Nope. No Decepticons. Although…"

His thoughtful turn of phrase was not something I had anticipated.

The boy, to my surprise, shifted on his feet to face Ironhide. "You've still got your arm cannons right?"

The ancient Thetacon growled. I could see he was torn between lingering annoyance at the rude human and delight that someone brought up the topic. "At least you have enough sense to appreciate my Pride and Joy." My weapons specialist brought the guns out of subspace quite gleefully. I secretly wondered how Sam would react if he was informed that "Pride" and "Joy" were literally the names that Ironhide had given his right and left cannons.

Sam _grinned_. "How good is your aim?"

The black bot snorted. "How well can you breathe?"

The boy held Ironhide's stare for a few moments, then nodded resolutely and made a beeline for the one van left untouched. Once he was close enough, he pulled the door open and climbed inside with an air that suggested he knew precisely what he was looking for and where to find it. I leaned to the side and activated the searchlight on my left shoulder pad to both provide him with visibility and to see for myself what he was doing.

I felt my optic ridges rise. He was not rifling through the pockets of the unconscious agents. Instead, he searched through a compartment built into a side panel. He even ignored the existence of his unconscious intended _mate_ in order to successfully retrieve a bag and, from it, a cellular phone.

Humans were such _strange_ creatures.

As if to enforce my conclusion, Sam hastily jumped back out, ran past us to make his way towards the van farthest from the center of the convoy and tossed the phone where the car light of the van landed on the asphalt. "Shoot it!" He shouted, only to be regarded by Ironhide as though he had suffered from processor meltdown. "Shoot it! It's a Deceptic-" The small device jumped in the air and morphed into a small and skittering figure I immediately recognized. "Gauh!" My spark jolted when Sam screamed, but he managed to duck out of the way of the creature as it lunged at his face. And when it repeated its attempts to secure a hostage, the boy managed to turn around and meet Frenzy with a kick to the optics.

I had to admit that, despite the complete lack of grace in that move – though I supposed it would have been far worse if the trench coat had been closed at the front – the kick was quite strong. It hurled the chittering bug through the air, making it disappear into the night.

But only to human sight. My optics tracked it easily, and by the time Frenzy met the asphalt again, Ironhide was ready. His arm cannon released a concentrated plasma bolt…

… which _missed_.

Frenzy had been able to spring away from the ground by arching his spindly, spider-like protolimbs, tossing himself away from the blast…

… and right into a second one.

The end of the least redeemable Decepticon I had ever encountered was a muffled eruption of yellow light and scattered debris. Only tiny shards of metal were left, but there were none larger than a human finger. Most importantly, the head had been entirely turned into slag. A pool of molten cyber metal that steamed as it seeped through the cracks of the crater now decorating the middle of the human-made road.

I turned to regard my weapons specialist, expecting to see Jazz pick fun at Ironhide for not having hit the first time, and I could only go still at the scene I laid my optics on. Ironhide, arm still extended, looked utterly _mortified_, Jazz was struck speechless by the larger bot's expression and little _Bumblebee_, his canon still smoking, stared, barefaced, at the remains of the Decepticon he had just blown into scrap.

Ratchet flicked his optics between all three, rolled them and stalked away, knowing that he was going to be ignored from then on, just like Sam's victorious cry of "Yes! Try and pull the pants of people _now_, creep!"

Bumblebee subspaced his considerably smaller plasma cannon and turned his bright blue but still utterly_ flat_ stare onto his age-long trainer.

Then he stalked off in Sam's direction. Intent, I assumed, on checking him for any new injuries.

_:Bumblebee powered up his weapon as soon as Sam called the shot the first time.: _I relayed my assumption to my medic as he came to stand beside me.

_:He did. Not sure if that means he completely trusts the human, exactly, but it does show that, despite his worries that something has happened to him, he still trusts him to __make sense__.:_

_ :So the look he gave Ironhide was him being insulted on the boy's behalf.: _I transmitted.

_:He's become very defensive of his charge.:_

It was plain to see in how the small yellow bot fussed over the much tinier human. And in how he still _hovered_ once he was assured Frenzy had not managed to claw at his face this time around. "Really, I'm okay 'Bee." The boy did not seem to mind using nicknames for those other than myself, I noted. I added the observation to my rapidly growing holofile regarding him. "Awesome shot by the way!" The scout seemed to glow at the praise, then ducked his helm, voice box chiming bashfully.

Twisting my helm back to where Ironhide and Jazz still stood, I witnessed my weapons specialist subspace his cannons and growl at Jazz. "Not. One. Word."

Ratchet snorted next to me, and I knew why. There were quite a few words that would fit this situation. Most notably the observation that Bumblebee had a much smaller cannon and, thus, a thinner plasma bolt to hit the tiny Decepticon with, by comparison.

If Prowl were here, he would have no issue with pointing out that Bumblebee could not have known when and where to aim unless he had _predicted Ironhide's miss_. Some would interpret it as exceptional teamwork gained after eons of training together and learning how to act in sync. Unfortunately, Irohide hated being shown up, and to have it done under _these_ conditions, and for someone to have the nerve to assume he'd _miss a shot_ – and, worse, being proven _right_ – was a big and blunt slap to the face plates of his considerable pride.

The odd pair of human and mech soon rejoined us. I was about to bring up the matter of allowing Ratchet to run a scan on him (though I was still considering permitting it even without Sam's consent) when the boy spoke. "That's one gargantuan security leak taken care of! With this I can actually feel like I helped you enough to ask for a favor without feeling too presumptuous!"

I stared at him, wondering in what galaxy everything he had done – from suffering through our destruction of his property to providing us with the location of the AllSpark and then almost dying and getting abducted because of us – did not warrant at least some aid on our part as reparation.

Before I could say anything, Bumblebee made some intense noises, sending me a reminder regarding his request. Taking Sam's questioning glance as my cue, I finally touched on the matter. "My scout is worried you may have physically suffered more through this night's events than what is outwardly apparent. His scans of you seem to return strange and alarming results." I gestured towards my medic with my servo. "Ratchet would like to run his own. It will let us know if the liquid nitrogen has disrupted Bumblebee's sensors."

I expected Sam to pale or fidget with worry, for his sake or Bumblebee's, but instead he gave me a strangely knowing look. "And you're totally going to back off if I say no." Bumblebee shifted uncomfortably on his pedes at the blatant skepticism. I, on the other servo, was more interested in the underlying humor there. "You can all do the eye hologram thing, right?" I nodded once. "Then if Doc Bot's willing to project one of whatever his scans are showing, then sure. Radiate away!"

Ratched grumbled in Mechan about cheeky hatchlings as he took a step forward. He also commed me privately. _:What in the pit happened to that stuttering, nervous creature of before?:_

_:Recent developments do not coincide with your initial psychological prognosis?: _I teased, amazed by how quickly my mood had shifted away from melancholy.

_:Don't make me remind you what the rule is when dealing with someone who knows your insides better than you do, Prime.:_

I would have risen to his barb just for the sake of it – holding a private conversation through the scan would not have even begun to strain our ability to multitask – but I changed my mind when Ratchet began the procedure. A cone beam visible even to human eyes emitted from Ratchet's wrist plates. It passed over and through the boy, up and down, and then the medic projected the life-size hologram of the small human.

Dead silence. Only the faint air currents still registered in my audials, and I toned them down even further than they already were as they were no help.

"Huh," Samuel did not appear the least bit surprised by the hardlight representation of his internal makeup. "Imagine that." And then he turned around and walked off, in the direction of the van farthest off. Bumblebee managed to transmit confusion and worry through his vocalizer despite it being damaged, and after looking between the boy and the hologram showing his internal anatomy, hastened to catch up with him.

Ratched tossed a final scan over the departing human, but the results were the same. "Slagging Pit." He muttered in our own language. "All evidence of internal damage or past injuries that I caught in my initial scan has… disappeared." The hologram increased in size until it was the same height as the medic. "That alone would have been enough to make me wonder if I was glitched but _this_." Cyberglyphics streamed on a side window, showing hormones and bodily fluids, all at optimum level and concentration. But the most shocking were the readings on the nervous system, on the bones and muscles, and even more importantly on the viscera. Peak durability and health, rivaling Earth's best athletes, but most importantly… "Perfect symmetry." Ratches rumbled in awe. "Even our protoforms fall short of it."

I had already added the information on Sam's brain to the holofile, but even the heightened activity and total symmetry _there_ did not hold my attention. No, what my optics could not stray from was the heart, now located right in the center of his thoracic cavity, beneath the sternum. And the lungs were no longer uneven. Instead of one having three lobes and the other just two (to allow room for the heart itself), there were three lobes on both. The space needed for the heart to comfortably perform its function came as a result of _both_ lobes from the lowest pair being smaller. Narrower.

A human chuckle next to me made my frame clank as my back struts straightened in surprise. Perhaps I should not have toned down my audials after all. I remedied the issue in time to hear Sam speak again. "Man, I'm so screwed if anyone finds out about this." But there was no fear there, only a resigned feeling of irony. "I bet Sector Seven would _love_ to play with that."

Behind him, Bumblebee produced a fierce, hostile _growl_ and his optics sought mine out. The message was clear enough. I did not give him the promise he was hoping for, however, and that he did not push the issue told me he would defer to me as always, if ever the time came where we would have no choice but to leave Sam to the fate of a laboratory experiment.

Assuming said fate came at the hands of _humans_.

But unlike myself, Bumblebee did not already have uncountable tragedies on his spark to soften the blow of another taking place. He would grieve forever, and while I am sure I am familiar enough with self-loathing to survive my own self-recrimination, I do not know if I could handle witnessing _his_. Especially since he would most likely not even blame me.

"Hey, it's okay!" I looked down to where the human was trying to reassure the yellow Autobot. "It was just a joke. I didn't mean anything by it." Bumblebee warbled sadly, and I felt a familiar flash of fury directed at Megatron for robbing the young one of his ability to communicate. "Besides, if my plan works, we won't have to worry about Sector Seven at all!"

I internally doubted this boy could truly curb the actions of an entire, government-approved organization, especially one that has shown so few scruples. But Bumblebee perked up, and I was amazed at the faith he seemed to have in the boy after such short a time in his company.

By this point, Ironhide and Jazz had rejoined us. They were glancing between Sam and the hologram Ratchet was still muttering over, but not saying anything.

"So." Sam looked up at me again, though he kept a palm on Bumblebee's ankle guard. "Think you can help me out? We kind of have to hurry since the sleeping gas will wear off soon."

That was one point we all agreed upon. "I would first need to know this plan you speak of."

Sam scratched his cheek in embarrassment. "Well, it's not so much a plan, since I'm gonna wing it for the most part. But it's fine!" He waved his hands frantically, trying to convince me he knew what he was doing. "If things don't work out you can just drive off and find the Cube like you were always going to right? They can't catch any of you anymore, since the helicopters went back to base." He snickered. "Due to a 'fuel sensor malfunction' I believe was the phrase."

It only made me wonder more what in space had occurred here, but I knew I would not get a better answer than before.

He seemed to take our silence as agreement, for he nodded to himself and then headed straight for Jazz, of all mechs. "Hey!" My lieutenant crouched to behold him better. "You're the one that did that magnetic thing that took their guns right?"

"S'right," Jazz said proudly.

He was about to launch into a grand boast of some sort, but Sam cut him off by grabbing one of his digits and tugging him along. "Great! Then you get to come over here." Due to what could only have been sheer surprise, Jazz allowed himself to be led along by the servo. It was an amusing sight that even Ironhide snickered at.

"Over here guys!" Sam called for us, and I decided we may as well play along for now and see what he intended to do.

The boy led Jazz to the pile of weaponry. "Okay. You stand here and look all im... posing…" He looked at us, then at Jazz and the obvious size disparity. "Actually, you stand there looking _smug_. Optimus, you and Ratchet stand over there and look all imposing, okay?" He motioned towards the other side of the telephone and gun piles.

"Hey!" Jazz complained. "No cracks 'bout my height!"

"Why not?" That was Ironhide. "Kid's got you pegged, Jazz."

"Oh, you _would _be all proud o' yourself, parroting my lines." The small, streamlined Autobot was not amused.

I, however, _was_. Enough that I decided to contribute to the increasingly surreal situation. "What should Irohide do?"

Sam looked at me, surprised, and I realized he had not been about to give him actual directions. Perhaps he was leery of the weapons specialist despite his outer semblance of confidence.

But he narrowed his eyes, perhaps seeing through my act, and faced Ironhide without hesitation. "Him? Hmm." His grin turned positively devious. "Bee." The scout beeped. "Google penguins of Madagascar: The Movie." Then he spoke to the large, burly, ancient Thetacon warrior that had been alive before human civilization existed. The humongous mech that had more explosions to his name than had occurred during both human world wars. "I need _you_ to be _cute _and _cuddly_, soldier."

For an instant, my processor fritzed.

Jazz collapsed to his knees and began to slam his servo against the asphalt in hysterics. And over the next half a breem, he kept laughing and _laughing_ so hard that I was amazed none of the humans around us stirred.

With a growl of rage, Ironhide began to stomp towards the impertinent human youngling. "Think that's funny, _squishy_?" His arms began to hum and glow as he prepared to bring his canons out. "I dare you to say that again!"

Behind Sam, Bumblebee looked as though he was valiantly trying not to do what Jazz was still doing. Giving in to curiosity, I looked up what Samuel had mentioned, and could not stop a snicker from slipping out. "Even _you_, Prime?" Ironhide growled, but I paid him little mind as I wondered how many of his own subroutines Ratchet had turned off in order to avoid any outward reaction_. _I somehow could _sense_ his internal laughter.

Ironhide then stiffened and glared at Jazz. I assumed the latter realized he would be unable to actually _voice_ anything for a time, so he sent a comm instead.

The Thetacon's optics dimmed, and I deduced he was finally looking up the topic himself, likely at Jazz's direction.

As expected, the wide-shouldered bot only snarled harder and rounded on the human, arms almost aglow as the subspace-tapping transformation sequence powered up. "You wanna be vaporized, punk?!"

"That would make Bumblebee sad." Sam countered, as if he was not less than a moment away from having a plasma cannon shoved in his face.

Enraged sneer still in place, the mech nonetheless faltered. He met the yellow scout's optics, and despite himself his expression softened minutely at the deliberately pathetic twist of those optic ridges, and the pitiful scratching sounds of a defective vocalizer.

Even though we all knew that impression of a wounded animal was totally fake, it worked. It always did, and Bumblebee was just as aware of that fact as the rest of us.

"I knew it!" Sam crowed and looked up and to the right, where his guardian stood. "He's just a big softie inside, isn't he?"

Ironhide glowered his best glower, trying to save some dignity. "I'm gonna let that go this once only because Bumblebee likes you. Primus knows why!" His arms were still ready to bring out the weapons the rest of the way, however. "'Sides, I try not to murder fleshlings just because they talk about things they've got no idea about."

"I don't know what I'm talking about you say?" I got ready to step in before Samuel really went too far. "I know of at least _one_ little girl who still believes in the tooth fairy that that would disagree with you."

It made absolutely no sense due to the utter lack of context, but Ironhide froze in what I could not interpret as anything other than horror. It was an alarmingly obvious sort of disbelieving shock, and the first time in a hundred vorns when the summoning of Pride and Joy was reversed mid-completion without some physical damage or technical glitch being to blame. "How… How do _you_ know about that?" The mech whispered in abject disbelief. He looked… looked as if the apocalypse had come and brought the final death to all his potential practice targets.

Sam crossed his arms and grinned as wide as his flexible, organic mouth allowed. "Divine Intervention."

It made me wonder if a Divine Intervention really _had_ taken place this night. I, for one, never did believe what I had just witnessed could be achieved by anyone other than Primus Himself.

Perhaps I was being too harsh on Ironhide, thinking such, but I was not the only one. Even Jazz was staring, slack-jawed. Shock-sparked hysterics replaced by processor-halting amazement of similar cause.

At last taking pity on my third in command, Sam turned around and made for the closest van. "Bee. You're with me."

Completely thrown off, the yellow Autobot looked from me to Ironhide, to Jazz, to Ratchet, again to Ironhide and finally back to me. Then he shrugged helplessly and followed.

Ironhide, still fuming and cycling air through his vents, quietly walked to stand on Ratchet's other side, wrongly believing that mech, at least, would not crack a joke at his expense. Alas, that was not to be, despite him having maintained a neutral composure throughout the entire ordeal. After all, he was not the Devil's Medic just because of his horribly caustic bedside manner. "I have decided that aquatic flightless birds would be a fascinating subject of study once this mission is over." Ironhide went rigid at the casual mention of the Forbidden Topic. "But since ice has proven to be such a danger to our inner workings, a trip to the arctic tundra would be ill advised."

Was he really showing Ironhide mercy? _Ratchet_?

Apparently not. "Perhaps we will be able to procure some from a zoo-"

Ironhide snarled and cursed in Mechan, then rounded on the Chief Medical Officer. "Not. Another. Word!" But he knew that few ever won an argument with the CMO, so he immediately whirled around and stomped off, powering Pride and taking post at just beyond the distance reached by our short-range sensors. None of us were fooled into thinking he was _only_ taking post as sentry, but we let him be.

Well, that was not quite true. Jazz kept pinging and sending him private comm transmissions throughout the next twenty minutes. Internally, I was amazed it did not devolve all the way into a brawl. I was thankful that there was something else to keep my processor focused on, specifically Sam and Bumblebee's activities.

Which consisted of having Bumblebee round up _everyone_ in the vans and sit them on the ground, leaning against one another in a semicircle, where Sam would handcuff them one after another, intertwining the chains as he did. Simmons was placed some distance ahead of them, closer to our position. I assumed the boy was going to try and talk to him for whatever reason.

Once that was accomplished, and their small dog had been brought over and deposited a reasonably far distance away from Ironhide, only his parental units and the female, Mikaela Banes, were left. Bumblebee carried the parents carefully in his servos. The femme, however, Sam did not allow Bumblebee to move. After unbinding her hands, he picked her up himself, bridal-style, and carefully carried her out of the van and towards our position, the youngling trailing behind him like a faithful guard.

When he was between me and Ratchet, he laid her on the ground, propping her back against the car wheel that made up part of my ankle. I shifted my pede for better support, which he answered with a grateful glance, but mostly he focused on her with an expression of fond affection I was used to seeing on age-old sparkmates.

Kneeling before her, the boy produced a cloth out of his oversized coat's pocket and pressed it against her face.

She roused with surprising speed, and I did not need Ratchet to list the signs of a panicked reaction to recognize it. "Mikaela. Mikalea!" Sam's shouts stopped her short, though she had managed to slap his hands away, along with the cloth in it, which I belatedly recognized as a surgical mask. ""Kaela, it's okay! You're okay. We're all okay. Everything's fine, see?" He motioned around him and then up, bringing our presence to her attention.

"Sam?" The girl blinked several times, wrestling with drowsiness until she won. "What happened?" Flicking her eyes from Ratchet to Bumblebee, she squinted at the latter. "Are those your parents? Where are we? What-" her vision must have cleared, enabling her to register the full situation. The halted, disorderly group of cars, with us right in the middle. Figuratively speaking. "Oh."

I did not correct the assumption she must have made.

"Right." Sam stood, facing Bumblebee. "Okay… You can lay them on the ground next to Ratchet. Unless he minds?"

I almost expected him to, but the CMO harrumphed. "At least it will make it easier to run a scan." I shook my head at that. Ah, Ratchet and his scans. "You have not brought them back online," he observed. "You do not intend for them to stand witness?"

Sam winced. "Dad's a tossup, but can you imagine my mom not making a scene?"

"Sam?" Mikaela asked, pulling herself to her feet. "What are you talking about?" Casting a glance over our situation, she asked the predictable thing. "What happened here?" Not unexpectedly, her gaze switched from Sam to me a couple of times.

"I'll explain later," Sam told her. "Well, in two days."

"Sam-"

"Mikaela." He cut her off, facing her fully. "I can't explain right now. I'm sorry, but I can't. Not without ruining things. I know you're confused, and you're probably going to be angry really soon and I'll understand if you'll think me too crazy to associate with afterwards." She opened her mouth but he lifted a hand to ward her off. "And I guarantee that you very well _might_."

That sounded rather alarming, and not just to my own audials.

Mikaela seemed off balance, but she recovered with surprising speed for someone that had just come out of unconsciousness. She frowned, frustrated and even somewhat frightened. "What's that supposed to mean? What are you going to do that's so crazy? Because unless you're going to offer yourself up as a hostage in… exchange… for…" Her eyes widened and her hand flew to cover her mouth.

I suddenly understood.

Even if we did take these humans away, Sector Seven would come looking for them again and again. They could not go back to their homes and they would not last long on the run. But Samuel was the only one they really needed.

"Sam, no! You can't!" Mikaela argued before I could, grabbing him by the hands. "You can't trust them! Or any deal with them!"

"Can't I really?" He echoed, though I got the impression that it wasn't _her_ he was responding too.

Sure enough, Sam smiled sadly but didn't answer anything further. Instead, he faced Bumblebee, who had finished relieving his servos of the parents and had returned to the boy's side. "'Bee, I need you to promise me that if this goes pear-shaped, you'll take Mikaela and my folks and leave-"

Bumblebee's vocalizer exploded with such defiance, anger and confused denial that Sam took a step back, bumping into the girl and almost sending her to the ground. He managed to catch her in time, but the commotion got the scout to quiet down and even warble apologetically.

Sam faced him again, still as determined as before. "I'm serious 'Bee. Take Mikaela and my parents and leave." Bee's optic ridges pressed together and his vents whooshed air in frustrated rage. "I mean it!" Sam glared back, then turned on the rest of us in turn. "That goes for all of you. It was… appreciated the first time, but this time I won't be falling to my death. This time, _I'm_ taking full responsibility, but that also means that if what I'm about to try doesn't work, no one takes the fall but me."

"Understood," I said before Bumblebee could strain his vocalizer further by continuing his protests. It was the first time ever that the scout glared at me, truly glared with helpless anger and betrayal. It pained my spark to see it, to feel those feelings directed at me from _him_.

But there had been so _many_ times when I wished I could trade _my_ life for that of my people. For my planet.

How could I begrudge Samuel the chance to make the choice I so often wished for?

"Thank you." As the boy strained his neck to look up at me directly and say those two words, I again had that odd feeling that he really understood.

It was absurd.

"Hey…" The boy's tone took a gentle turn, despite the almost violent reaction that the yellow bot had earlier. "Hey, come on look at me 'Bee." The scout knelt in front of Sam but still looked away. Hopelessness and grief marred his every move. "Bumblebee…" The optics finally lifted when Samuel reached out to the servos Bumblebee had let lie in top of one another in his lap. "I'm sorry. Maybe nothing will happen, but if it does… isn't it better if only _one_ of us has to be taken? Instead of all of us, or having to live on the run?"

I wondered if Bumblebee realized Sam was doing this for _him_ as well as his human kin. Yes, he did. I could tell from his response, even though the keen my youngling produced held no words in it.

Sam went on. "Because I'm telling you now, my folks can't make it in a life like that, and when they get caught in order to get to me, we'll only be back in this situation again, and you'll feel even more guilty than you're feeling now." The bot reached out to touch Sam's chest with a digit and chittered brokenly. "And if what my gut tells me is true, and I think it is… Making an enemy of the US government is not a good idea if you want to find the AllSPark. You'd probably manage it regardless but… I honestly feel you deserve better than getting labeled the villains just for trying to recover the hope of your race."

Bumblebee keened, then turned on the radio. _"It shouldn't have to be you."_

Sam smiled weakly. "It has to be me."

The scout returned his hopeless humor in song. "_It had to be youuu…. It had to be youuu..."_

"Frank Sinatra," Sam recognized, earning him a strange glance from the female. "What? He was an awesome singer!"

"I know. I just didn't expect _you_ to know."

They both laughed. It was a poor, token effort to lighten the mood, but I suppose the thought mattered more than the act in this instance.

_:I say we just scoop them all up right now and roll out. Frag the rest.:_ I did not show it, but Ironhide's sudden message startled me. Turning my helm to behold him, I saw he was thoughtfully watching the scene playing out next to me. I did not transmit my surprise at him taking such a stance after the earlier confrontation with the human, but he saw it just from my look. _:Bumblebee likes him. Primus knows why.: _He turned away from me to watch the barely visible horizon immediately after that.

"Sam…" Mikaela, again.

"I know," and he truly sounded like he did. He faced her, touching her cheek. "But 50 years from now you'll have to figure out whether or not you regret getting into that car with me. And you have to _live_ to be able to make that decision. Not just survive. And if anything more happens to you…" He looked up at Bumblebee "Or _you_," then the rest of us, a roaming glance "Or any of you when I know full well I can do something about it but don't..." He faced his intended mate again. "I know _I _won't consider that living if I survive this."

A private comm line opened, and I expected Ironhide again, but Jazz' subdued voice greeted me instead. _:Kid's got the same issues as you, Boss Bot.:_

I did not reply.

A stifling silence descended, but Sam knew as well as I that not much longer could pass without the Sector Seven operatives or his parents coming back online.

"Right, one last thing," he addressed me. "Did you look up on the Internet where the coordinates on my grandfather's glasses go?"

"Yes."

"Google Maps?" At my nod, he seemed pleased. "Think you can project it for me."

Turning the two-dimensional satellite picture into a three dimensional model was a simple matter for our hardware.

Sam gazed at the hologram for a time. "Hoover Dam?"

"That is what the World Wide Web states."

"I'll never wrinkle my nose at geography again." The boy stretched and cracked his neck to loosen it. "Okay. It was magnificent knowing you all. Now let the hostile negotiations commence."


	4. Arc I-4: Hostile Negotiations

**A/N:**Next chapter we're going back to Sam's point of view. Also, I realized that I'm not moving through the plot as fast as I thought I would. I'd ask if you think I should skim more things, but I won't because I doubt I'll be able to. My idea of "flow" probably wouldn't allow it.

Do point out if I slipped any contractions in Optimus' musings, since he's not supposed to use them at all.

* * *

**Chapter 4: Hostile Negotiations**

"-. .-"

Let the hostile negotiations commence, the boy had said. Only they did not. Not right away. Whether because the boy was procrastinating or because he had simply forgotten that he had not, in fact, roused the two dozen agents clustered together in the back, he spent the next few minutes moving between them and pressing the pungent surgical mask to their faces. Their reactions to waking up to the sight of their once prisoner crowding their personal space, and us looming in the background, would have been amusing if Samuel's plan had not been what it was.

Finally, only Seymour Simmons was left, and Sam had cuffed his hands together in front of his body instead of the back for some reason.

Crouching in front of him, the boy placed the cloth over his mouth and nose and waited.

Compared to some of the others, his awakening was slow. Once he recognized who was in front of him, however, he went on full alert.

Though it did not do him much good. He actually fell on his back when he jerked away from the face mask.

Sam slowly straightened, returning the cloth to his pocket. I was glad I was not directly behind him. It allowed me to see his profile. For extra effect, I activated the searchlight on my right shoulder and aimed it at their position. Half a klik later, the others, save for Ironhide, did the same.

Sam waited for Simmons to climb to his feet in front of him, then his mouth slowly spread into a smile that to my optics was anything _but_ friendly. "Good morning."

The Sector Seven operative glared at the boy, then threw a wary but still defiant glance in our direction, and a hopeful (then resigned) look at his men, clustered in an unwilling flock some distance behind, before glaring at Sam again. "Good morning." It was a bland reply. I judged it a failed attempt at trying to act as though he still had some control over the situation.

Sam said nothing more. For one minute, then another. He just kept looking at Simmons. Just quietly watching.

And _watching_.

_:And waiting: _Jazz chimed in the shared comm. _:And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And watching and waiting. And wait-:_

_ :Jazz, shut UP!: _Ironhide roared over the open line.

After the three minute mark, Simmons was looking decidedly creeped out, as Bumblebee would say. Our searchlights threw his features into sharp relief, so it was not only obvious to us who had biometric sensors on full throttle, but also the small human femme at my feet. What was the boy waiting for?

"Okay, now it's just getting awkward," Mikaela muttered, but when it looked like she was about to walk over there, Sam spoke.

"Are you afraid of them?" he motioned with his head in our direction.

Simmons' eyes followed before he could stop himself, but he put on a façade of bravado. "As if!" he sniffed. "I ain't any more afraid of them than I am of _you_, kid."

Sam nodded, as though expecting that answer, though his frigid smile never left his face. "I'm tempted to call that a bluff. To attribute it to false bluster, but you really aren't afraid of them are you?"

My optics shuttered briefly while Simmons' eyes narrowed. "You trying to be my shrink now? I haven't brought my chaise longue, in case you haven't noticed."

Sam was not affected. "Come to think of it, you weren't really afraid of them earlier either, when they tore off the van roof to get to us. Afraid of what they might _do_, yes, but not of _them_." His glare was positively spiteful. "You didn't seem afraid of Bumblebee when you had him _impaled_ and _frozen_ for saving me and Mikaela from a gruesome death at your hands either."

There was the faintest grimace on Simmons' face, but it was gone in a nanosecond. I wondered what it meant, but I dared not indulge in any hope yet. "What do you want kid? Why did you even bother waking us up instead of scramming with your robots? Or is it that you want to unload on me before you have your NBE friends kill us in revenge?"

"Oh no," Sam waved randomly, unaffected by his barb. "They're just there to observe. Though I'm sure Bumblebee is ready to scoop me up in case he sees any danger coming towards me from one of you." I decided to keep a sensor on the scout just in case that proved true and I had to hold him back from interfering later on. But Sam was not done. "What does that say about you, though? That between a bunch of alien robots and my own blood kin, it was the _former_ that put any sort of effort into ensuring my wellbeing over the past 10 hours."

"They wouldn't have had to-"

"I don't want to hear it!" San snapped, and I was honestly surprised he was able to cause the other, older man to go silent. "Not after the two of us were almost hacked to bloody pieces by _your_ helicopter rotors. Not after you used harpoons and liquid nitrogen on Bumblebee for the high crime of saving us from falling to our deaths! And don't you _dare_ launch into a diatribe of how dangerous and untrustworthy these 'aliens' are when the only reason you even caught Bumblebee, the only reason any of you are even still _alive_, is because he let you! Because his commanding officer gave explicit orders to all his soldiers to refrain from attacking humans with those cannons they can turn their arms into at any given second. Told them not to attack, even in self-defense!"

Simmons was about to retort. Express his skepticism or launch some sort of rebuttal, or even state he had nothing to justify to Sam, but I never got to know which.

Sam got in his personal space before he could get a sound out. "He let his prized subordinate be taken," he hissed, and I felt guilt stab through my spark, despite knowing he had not meant to harm me by it. "Ordered his weapons specialist to stand down instead of letting him shoot the helicopters, because he refused to even risk loss of human life!" He poked him in the chest. "_Your_ life, you asshole!" Sam held the glare for a good while, before he stepped away, though his eyes still pinned Simmons. "I don't expect much from goons, but I'd like to think that at least those in charge of an organization, _any_ organization, would come closer than a cockroach to exemplifying the best humanity has to offer! So far, I've had to live with the disappointment."

"Whoa…" Mikaela Banes whispered from where she stood at my feet. "That was harsh…" Bumblebee clicked at her surprise and she smiled ruefully. "I had no idea he was such a good speaker."

Sam was in full throttle. I was impressed despite myself. "It would have actually been somewhat understandable if you _were_ afraid of them, but you don't even have _that_ excuse. Not for hunting them, not for illegally arresting us, and definitely not for being so smug about it and your ridiculous do-anything-and-get-away-with-it-badge." At that, Sam pulled out said badge from his right pocket and tossed it away like a piece of scrap.

Simmons followed it with his gaze, then threw Sam a dirty look.

Though he did not contest any of what the boy had said. Strange.

"They say we humans are afraid of what we do not understand," Sam started after a few moments.

"Oh, so we're advancing to philosophy now." Simmons only muttered those words, but I had adjusted my audial sensitivity upwards, so I heard it clearly.

Sam also heard it, but he chose to ignore it. "They _say_ that, but it's not really true is it?"

That took Simmons aback, and it also took me by surprise. I would have expected Samuel to give reasons for overcoming that flaw in human nature, not to completely disagree with what humans considered an age-old axiom.

"You didn't fear the Autobots, and you don't fear them now, even though it's clear you don't understand them and don't _want_ to understand them either," Sam left his position, circling him as he talked. "But I'm not surprised. After all, 'we fear what we don't understand' is just one of the many flawed sayings humanity has raked up over the years. All in the name of blaming human nature for our excesses. A means to persuade ourselves it's not our fault. That it's God's fault so it's okay to be greedy, or proud, or spiteful, or hateful." He stopped and spun on his heels half-way, pinning Simmons with a one-eyed stare. "We humans really do seem to like our _lies_."

_:Boss…: _Jazz commed in awe_. :Are ya' recordin' this?:_

I did not even dignify that with a response. We recorded _everything_. Constantly.

"So you think you can prove wrong what millions of people considered and still consider true," Simmons hedged. "That's bold, kid. Pointless, but bold."

"Oh no!" Sam waved again, standing completely at ease. "I don't really need to. I, at least, would like to believe I'm not that insecure. Anyone willing to see past the length of their nose would find it obvious. After all, if it _was_ human nature to fear and seek to harm and destroy, then all children would be sociopathic killers. But they're not. Then again, if it _was_ in human nature to fear what we don't understand, we wouldn't live past the emergence of our rational mind. After all, a child doesn't understand air, but it's not afraid to breathe it. A child doesn't understand the sun, but runs around during summer anyway. Children aren't afraid of strangers. Children aren't afraid or even wary of sharp objects, even though they should at least be cautious. Instead, the more we grow – the more we _do_ understand – the more afraid we become. And since many go their whole lives without seeing an angry animal or suffering an accident, the only conclusion that remains is that we rake up that fear _because _we understand what those things – too much sun, lack of air, sharp objects – _could_ do to us. And most importantly, we rake up fear because we understand what other _humans_ do or could do to us."

Silence.

I had allowed Samuel to take up the task of confronting this man believing I knew what to expect, but I had just been proven wrong. With each new word coming from his mouth, I, Optimus Prime, found myself in awe of him. That one so young, even by his race's standards, would be so eloquent. Ratchet knew well to ask where the nervous, stuttering, pheromone-overwhelmed Samuel Witwicky had gone.

Below, Mikaela let out a gust of air. "Okay. I'm not sure where this is going anymore, but I don't think I mind listening for a while."

I, however, did. It was hard enough to let Sam proceed with his plan when I thought he was only trying to negotiate a hostage exchange. But now, as he was picking apart Simmons' logic, _human _logic, in an attempt to reach to him, a potential result of very low probability even now, I wondered if I could walk away now that I was coming so close to thinking _he_ was as close as I could hope to find to the best that humanity had to offer.

Sam hummed and faced Simmons fully again. "Ultimately, it all boils down to _control_." He waited, _daring_ Simmons to try to throw a jibe. He did not. "Fortunately, the same arguments as before apply here, so at least I can be reassured that the desire to be in control of everything else is, also, not part of human nature." He made a step towards the S7 agent. "_Bizarrely_, though, people exhibit that very tendency alarmingly often." The mock-wonder coloring his voice seemed to set off alarms in Simmons' mind, going by how pronounced the latter's grimace became.

Too long had passed without the disgruntled agent getting a word in edgewise. "You realize that preachers are the ones most renowned for putting people to sleep, right? You should have just let that gas run its course at this rate."

"And there we go!" Sam seemed positively _delighted_ by that interruption. So much that both Jazz _and _supremely worried Bumblebee snickered over the comm line. "An attempt to gain _control_ over the situation! Thanks for so awesomely proving my point!" Simmons' mouth curled in distaste. "Though I guess you never really totally lost control over the situation, did you?"

My optic ridges raised, and Simmons seemed earnestly surprised.

"Earlier, when Optimus Prime first cornered you after you abducted us," he gestured in my direction. "You said you're not _authorized_ to tell him anything. Except to tell him as much. And now, despite how obvious it is that you would love nothing more than to verbally trounce me – not that you could…" He let that thought settle. "You've been holding back in order to avoid spilling any secrets with them nearby."

Simmons looked grudgingly impressed.

So did Sam, and the lack of spike in his already elevated heart rate told me he, too, meant it. "I assume you're worried that you've been dosed with a truth compound or something in addition to the sleeping gas?" The head agent's face remained carefully blank, but the same could not be said about those of the others. "And the erratic body language you exhibited not too long after awakening… I assume those were code signals telling your men to keep their mouths shut too?"

Upon that deduction that amazed even I, Seymour Simmons showed real astonishment. No for long, his defiant and irritated mask came back swiftly enough, but it was there. "You've been holding out on everyone kid."

Sam snorted. "I'm the direct descendant of the man who claimed to have discovered an 'Ice Man' in the artic." Simmons's expression faltered briefly at the mention of Megatron, and I knew Sam had not missed it, but he plowed on. "I'm a descendant of the man who then spent the rest of his days writing and babbling about strange symbols that any linguist would be able to identify as a _language_. I am a descendant of the man who was deliberately discredited later in life. By two people who did all they could to persuade the world that Archibald Witwicky had _only_ gone insane." Sam then laid on the sarcasm as thick as it could possibly get. "Now picture the descendant of that man showing high intellectual capabilities early in life. _Obviously, _said descendant would be allowed to progress at his own pace, like any other prodigy. _Certainly_, he wouldn't have to fear _in the least_ that he'd suffer the same as his great-great-grandfather. Or that he and his loved ones would be carted off by secret organizations in the middle of the night. After all, there is _no _chance that said organization would suspect his higher brain functions to be the result of alien meddling instead of plain human evolution."

As I saw it, Simmons boggled at that so-called revelation. Sam had never actually said he had done what he implied, but the agents would no doubt make their own assumptions. I knew better than to be fooled, and I knew Sam did not even intend for us to believe the same, but the ongoing speech only left me more baffled. More curious about what could have caused this change which was clearly beyond merely physiological at this point.

I felt something softly hitting my ankle wheel, and when I looked down I saw the femme bumping the back of her head against it. "I _dare_ him to get on my case about my secret juvie record after this. Just let him _try_."

Bumblebee whirred in amusement.

"Why the look?" Sam challenged Simmons, either not hearing or paying attention to us. "Is it any different from how _you_ hide behind obfuscating stupidity in order to keep some _control_ over the situations you find yourself in?"

Simmons' entire composure slumped. He dropped his head, releasing a sigh, then he stretched his shoulders as much as his still handcuffed hands allowed. When he met Sam's gaze again, he was still irritated, showing that his previous manner had not all been an act, but the absence of most of the tension was quite telling.

_:How many of you were fooled by his idiot routine?_: Bumblebee asked on the shared comm channel.

_:I admit to some surprise at this turn of events,"_ I answered. It was true, though it was also true that agent Simmons was only in my presence for mere minutes before the disaster of a joor ago, so I had justification.

_:I thought somethin' was weird, but ah' thought it was obvious to the rest o'ya, so I didn't say anythin'.: _Typical Jazz.

_ :… Ironhide?: _Bumblebee pressed.

_ :… You're never going to let this go, are you?: _I almost had to pull down my facemask to hide my mirth.

Bumblebee pounced on the opportunity. _:Cancel that decacycle of basic drills and you have a deal.:_

_ :Fine!:_

_ :Thanks!: _The youngling chirped_. :Oh by the way, I didn't see through it either!:_

_ :Why you fragging little sneak-!: _I forcefully shut down the shared connection. If they were going to bicker, they could do it on their own resources.

Ratchet commed me privately after that. _:I was able to synthesize the airborne sedative and am standing by to apply it to the parental units to ensure they do not rouse and endanger the delicate situation by panicking at an inopportune time.:_

That _did_ make me pull down my battle mask.

With all pretenses gone, Simmons moved things along. "What do you want kid?"

I interpreted that to mean that he was not going to consent to any dealings with _us_, but he would indulge_ Sam_. My frail hope dwindled in the face of the likelihood of all humans eventually showing the same reluctance to communicate directly with the Autobots. But I reminded myself that Sam was human also, and that Simmons had refused to acknowledge even _him_ until a short time ago.

"Nothing else than what you or anyone else would. Control," Sam tilted his head. "That is, after all, what it all boils down to, doesn't it? We don't fear what we don't understand. We don't fear _aliens_ because they're alien. _Other_. It's just another prejudice on a long list. We fear them no more than we fear strangers. No more than we dislike their physical forms based on conventions we've subconsciously chosen to class as normal. _Safe_. No, the only reason we have to fear others is if they have _power_. And the only reason we fear their _power_ is because, subconsciously, we envision the possibility they could use that power to gain control over _us_ and our lives. Or rather, to remove _our_ control."

That really _was_ the root cause of conflict. Of _fear_. Unfortunately, most races I encountered only seemed to see it when justifying cruelty. And, heartbreakingly often, that cruelty was what qualified, in their minds, as a preemptive strike against what they considered dangerous. It was not quite as unfortunate as deriving actual pleasure from that cruelty, but it was a stance which could cause almost as much damage.

"You agree, don't you? Now that it's been pointed out to you." Sam reduced the distance he'd placed between himself and Simmons by another step. "Do you _understand_ me, Simmons? Truly understand?"

"And if say I don't?" His look and tone gave nothing away.

The frigid smile returned to Sam's face. "Then you won't begrudge me if I do what any other _human_ would do in my shoes." He offhandedly indicated us, even though his heartbeat climbed slightly higher than his nonchalance outwardly suggested. "Openly bask in the feelings of safety and relief provided by the presence of my allies." Bumblebee chirped in delight. Delight and hope that Sam wasn't going to offer himself up after all. "Feel content that my parents are out of that van and away from _you_. Gloat, maybe, that my side has the bigger guns."

Ironhide really did _not_ have to power both Pride and Joy, but I could understand why he would be caught up in the moment. Away from the rest of us as he was, and as the only one who did not have a light aimed at the humans, he must have looked like a suddenly there, terrifying, looming giant when the shine of his cannons abruptly illuminated his frame in the deep dark of the night. The dark that must have seemed all the deeper to the humans whose eyes had had to adjust to our searchlights.

And if one giant was there all along, hidden, they must have wondered… how many others could there be?

"I could destroy your weapons in front of you. Have the same happen to your communications devices," Sam mused, and with each new suggestion he made another step towards Simmons, until he was almost within arm's reach. He was facing me now, however, which meant that the left side of his body was out of Simmons' line of sight. "But there's one thing that would work best for me." Reaching in the pocket of his oversized trench coat, he actually shocked me by pulling out a handgun.

Mikaela gasped in astonishment and Bumblebee clicked in surprise at the sight of Samuel Witwicky slowly, casually lifting the gun and pointing it right into Simmons' face. "Negotiate from a position of _power_."

In all honesty, I was equal parts astonished and alarmed. Sam must have picked up the weapon when he briefly walked off after Ratchet ran the scan. Otherwise we would have known about it.

My weapons expert opened a shared comm just so he could express his reaction. _:Holy. Slag. Didn't even suspect he had it in him…:_

_:Ironhide…: _I tiredly chastised him. This was no time to erupt in _admiration_, of all things.

Simmons, I noted, did not even flinch. He did start sweating more than before, and he let some worry slip when the gun barrel ended up between his now wider eyes. Then he winced when he heard the large group of agents collapse in a heap behind him. One or more of them must have reacted too abruptly and, handcuffed together in mixed up daisy-chains as they were, managed to pull everyone else down with them.

"So what do you say?" Sam asked glibly, worryingly at ease for someone who had a loaded gun pointed at someone's head. That my sensors did register a small irregularity in his heart rate was a minor consolation. "Got it in you to barter?"

My grudging respect for the head agent went up a notch when he refused to falter. "Sorry to say it, kid, but you can't intimidate me with just a gun. Besides, I don't think you have the guts to pull the trigger."

"Oh, I promise you I will pull it before the end of our conversation," Sam pronounced ominously, and I was starting to worry that whatever had occurred to change him may not have been so divine after all. But the tenser the situation became, the more I realized that moving to interfere in any way would only do harm. Simmons would panic or just do something rash… Was this why Sam had let me assume he was going to offer himself instead of… of _this_?

"And It's not just the gun," Sam continued. "If I'd expected you to fold to _that_, I'd have asked Ironhide to come closer. Or maybe Bumblebee, since it was _his_ gun that took out that Decepticon over there." He nodded in the direction of Frenzy's resting place. Simmons didn't like it, but he looked where he was being pointed, and Bumblebee helpfully moved his searchlight to that spot. "The Decepticons are the bad robots if you were wondering," Sam noted, then he glared. "And he was disguised as a cellphone in one of your _vans_. The same one you shoved _Mikaela_ into."

Seymour Simmons actually winced.

_:Sweet Primus, by the way he wields guilt and misinformation you'd think he's a priest.: _Ratchet grumbled, on the open channel for once. _:Reminds me of someone I know_._:_

_ :Actually, Ratchet, thos're politicians,:_ Jazz chimed.

_:Don't you tell me about politicians, brat. I was in the Senate, in case you've forgotten!:_

_:Ah' can see why. The rest of'em would never admit it either.:_

Knowing how Ratchet would react, I left the conference, pondering Sam's ability to bring out both the best and the worst in my mechs through sheer insanity.

"Okay," Simmons tried to move things along, or buy time given how his eyes were shifting, looking for a way out or hoping backup would suddenly come, but finding none. "Might as well hear it. What do you want?"

"Well, VIP treatment would be nice. For us _and_ the Autobots," I did not need to be an expert in human behaviors to know how _that_ request was received, although I sincerely appreciated the attempt. "Also, Mikaela's juvie record. I want it gone, _forever_."

"Ha!" Simmons blustered. "And what do you think could persuade me to do all that?"

"Information." The answer did not surprise me overmuch, but I did wonder if it was really necessary to go through this entire farce. Ironhide would be right to say we may as well have shoved a gun in the man's face and forced him to listen to us from the beginning. "Information that you don't want getting out." Ah. My assumptions had been once again proven wrong.

Simmons laughed. "Who could you tell? Who would believe you?"

"The Russians." Simmons' laughter tapered off. "The Germans. The Chinese. The Japanese. Take your pick."

Simmons glared. "You're bluffing." At Sam's unimpressed look, he backtracked. "You don't know anything important."

"Hoover Dam." Even without my sensors notifying me of the abrupt spike in Simmon's heartbeat, I would have known that hit a nerve by how pale the man turned. "That's the location of the Cube, am I right?" It was too late to really hide the unwilling confirmation from us. "And by the way you reacted when I mentioned the Ice Man earlier, I'm guessing you have a mech there too. So Sector Seven was created to 'deal with' them and research aliens, right? Run experiments and dissection? Indulge me, if you will, is he really big and chrome-grey, with claws instead of fingers and a really nasty-looking face?" My systems froze at that realization, and I inwardly cursed myself for not reaching it sooner.

Megatron and the AllSpark were _in the same place!_

Primus save us all.

Simmons's mouth had slowly opened with each new assumption that Sam had candidly voiced. The boy had lowered the gun, but the other would probably not have even noticed it anymore at that point. "The way you captured Bumblebee was pretty efficient, which means it was a tried and true method. I'm guessing you keep the harbinger of death on ice the same way?"

The silence that fell lasted so long that I had time to wonder what a miracle it was that no civilian cars had driven by ever since we'd caught up with the disabled Sector Seven convoy. And it was a long time indeed as I, too, had to process the new urgency that our mission had just taken, reassess parameters and switch up the priority of our objective.

I felt literally like I was standing around while waiting for a ticking time bomb to detonate.

"…Harbinger of death?" Simmons croaked.

"Megatron," Samuel blandly informed him. "Leader of the Decepticons. Came to Earth looking for the Cube Optimus over there launched into space in order to ensure it was out of his grasp. Bad enough that the Universe decided that random trajectory had Earth at the other end, but you and your organization just _had_ to take them both to the same place. Great _job_ by the way. If Megatron's megalomania didn't ensure he'd try to enslave us all, conducting live dissections on his insides definitely did it by now!" He concluded dryly.

Simmons mouthed silently, then shook his head, lapsing into denial. "No. No, Sorry kid, but you have to admit that sounds too farfetched. It's too much. No way it could all have piled up like that."

"Crazy or not, it's true. At least that's what I'm assuming from your total failure to debunk my assessments." Sam countered. "Megatron wants to use the cube to transform Earth's technology and basically take over the Universe. A lofty and impossible long-term goal, granted, even for beings that are functionally immortal and have lived for longer than this edition of the human civilization's been around, but madmen never seem to mind. Believe me or not, it doesn't matter. What will happen will happen, and when shit hits the fan I'll be sure to let everyone I mentioned before know whose fault it was. Can you picture their reactions to learning you've been sitting on this secret since before the first world war? Then you can be proud of having singlehandedly ruined the United States of America and probably the rest of the planet."

The agent struggled for a counter. Any counter. "It's NBE1. That's what we call it. And you're painting these things as more dangerous than they are. You forget _we're_ the ones who caught _them_." His eyes flickered to Bumblebee, who growled in disdain.

Sam rolled his eyes. "Because I'm _sure_ Megatron was in any better position to fight back than when my twice-great-grandfather found him. And we already established why you were able to capture Bumblebee."

Simmons drew himself to his full height, and there _was_ a visible disparity between his and Sam's, but it did not faze the latter in the least. "You can't go to the Russians or anyone else with this! It's a matter of national security!" Ah, he tried to reassert his authority while playing the boy's assumed patriotism.

"The authorities then," Sam agreed all too quickly. "You're absolutely right. I'd like to think I live in a free and fair country, so in theory I would only have to reveal to the authorities the way you abducted me and the others tonight and my life would get back to normal." There was no way Sam could be that naïve, and Simmons knew it. It was visible on his face, not just my bio-sensors. "I could even strengthen my case. Point out that the speed with which the troops showed up at my house, and the sheer amount of them, imply there's always been some in Tranquility. Meaning Sector Seven has been spying on my family since forever." Simmons was grinding his teeth at this point, and I felt Bumblebee shift in anger over Sam's stolen freedoms. "And the speed with which you got reinforcements means probably all of Sector Seven is out in force too for some reason. I wonder why…" I, too, wondered, but the possibilities brought up by my processor were too worrying to focus on at this time. "Lots of things to get you jailed over, and Sector Seven disbanded-"

"That'll never happen." Simmons said, completely certain. Then he smirked. "Sorry to burst your bubble, kid, but it really won't."

"Liar," Sam chimed, no more rattled, outwardly, than before. It was positively _worrying_. "Of course it'll happen, unless you're implying that we don't live in a free country. That Sector Seven is somehow exempt from the constitution?" There was no confirmation nor denial. "That you're allowed to steal the rights and freedoms of everyone else?"

No answer.

Sam had his gun to Simmons's face so fast that the man finally flinched. "By _rights_," Sam started lowly. Menacingly. "I can shoot you right now and call it self-defense."

Bumblebee started. So did Mikaela, but she had long ago been rendered speechless.

_ :Er, boss bot. The kid __**is**__ just pretendin', right?:_

_:Yes Jazz.: _I had no doubt Sam would never lower himself to murder a prisoner. Even if these psychological clashes reminded me of Decepticon tactics too much to feel comfortable watching them happen. I could not believe that the boy who had comforted Bumblebee so earnestly earlier could sink so low.

Apparently, neither did Simmons, though likely for different reasons. "Hey kid, calm down." He raised his hands in front of his face. "Careful with that thing unless you want an accident on your conscience."

Sam narrowed his eyes. "Did you forget already, Seymour Simmons?" The gun was perfectly steady in his left hand, and even my sensors did not perceive any major fluctuations in Sam's blood pressure, beyond the initial rise that had never wavered. "I made you one promise earlier. What was it? Do you remember?"

I rolled back through the conversation and realized what he was implying two seconds before the man himself. Simmons held his arms even higher, palms out in surrender. "Hey kid, stop joking-" he barely had time to throw his hands in front of his face and duck his head.

A gunshot sounded in the night.

Compared to our own firearms, it was loud and lacking in grace. It scared all the humans out of their skins, and made Bumblebee take a step forward in near-panic.

Simmons was thrown on his back with an undignified scream of fear. His back struck hard against the road and he covered his head with his arms, which were now free due to the bullet that had smashed through the thin chain previously connecting the handcuffs together. When he realized he was still alive, and no longer bound, he froze in disbelief and confusion, looking at his hands, then at the boy who was still standing over him, his gun pointed at his chest but otherwise unmoving.

Distantly, I realized that the noise had finally managed to start rousing Samuel's parents from their induced slumber.

And Mojo.

Making a split-nanosecond decision, I commed Ratchet with an order to not gas them back into unconsciousness. The human operative would likely react unfortunately if I or my Autobots tried to interfere to stop this madness, but perhaps Sam's parents…

Now if only they actually got a move on with their awakening, Primus slag it.

Below, I sensed Bumblebee relax and the female collapse to the ground in boneless relief. "He's dead," she vowed with the sort of manic fervor one entered upon being put through a harrowing experience. I had to admit this qualified perfectly. "He's so _dead_ when I get my hands on him. Freddie Krueger and Jason Voorhees will seem like harmless, handicapped little _puppies_ after I'm done with him."

That threw me for a loop, but Bumblebee proved to be his ever so helpful self and sent me a link to an article on an online encyclopedia about human motion pictures. Had my battle mask not been in place, I doubt I would have been able to conceal my reaction of bewilderment and mild concern – not only for Samuel's sanity (and safety, I supposed) but for Mikaela's faltering sanity also.

"Seems even I can pull off a point-blank shot," Sam said to the gasping man lying at his feet, voice level despite having heard everything Mikaela had said. "How did it feel? Did you feel scared? Helpless? Confused, maybe, by this disproportionate retribution? Did you ask yourself what you did to deserve this? Just now, did you ask yourself why you'd end this way after you've only been doing the best to serve your country? We're making abstraction of all your gloating and related jackassery at the moment of course."

"You," Simmons gasped, eyes straying from the gun to Sam's face and back. "You're crazy, kid! Crazy! Nuts! Bonkers! Mad!"

"Maybe," the boy admitted easily. "Maybe it jumped two generations and I inherited it from my great-great-grandpa. But that means I have an excuse, right? What was _yours_ when you tormented Bumblebee, essentially putting him through everything I just put _you_ through, only worse? Can you guess how _he_ felt?" Bumblebee's vocalizer revved in surprise, then rumbled. His posture had changed, I noticed. He was wringing his servos in front of him. "Helpless? Because he was forbidden from defending himself, so yes, I suppose. Scared? Not of death, I don't think, but that he'd failed his charge or commander? Definitely." And Bumblebee _would_ have felt that way instead of feeling betrayed by _me_. "Confused by how you responded to his act of saving two of _your_ species at his own expense? Maybe not, since you've been hunting him for ages, but you can be sure he was disappointed."

My sensors alerted me to a rapid rise in Simmons' pulse, and it was clear by how his lips came together into a sneer that he was about to try and-

He screamed, flinching and covering his face again as Sam released a second shot, which impacted against the asphalt next to his head.

The gunshot noise made the boy's parents finally start awake, and I allocated some resources to trying to figure out means to conduct damage control once they emerged from behind Ratchet's pede and saw what was happening.

"Get up!" Sam snapped at the agent.

With a glare, Simmons got to his feet with as much composure as he could, which was not much.

Then he could only gape stupidly when Sam flipped the gun he was holding and held it out for Simmons to take.

In all honesty, I could understand that reaction, since it coincided with my own quite wonderfully. I was _truly_ glad I had my battle mask on. My jaw piece had not dropped, exactly, but…

I wished Bumblebee was a bit farther back, closer to me, so I could see what _he_ looked like.

Then, as if the situation was not already beyond the level of absurd this reality should have allowed, Samuel's parental units chose that particular moment to notice they were lying amidst the feet of giant alien robots.

Naturally, they panicked.

I gave into the impulse to press two digits against my noseplates when the screaming started, but despite the rest of us spectators' attention snapping to the new commotion, I kept most of my focus on the main scene. For that reason, only _I_ saw what happened next and, consequently, only _I_ was able to make sense of what happened after that.

After a momentary grimace, concentration and_ opportunity_ flashed in Sam's eyes, then he jumped forward, pressed the gun into Simmons right hand, using the chance to put the safety on. Then, moving before Simmons could react, he used his free one to reach for Simmon's _left _, to pull it along as he spun on his heel, pushed back against the agents chest and quickly grabbed the one that was now _armed_ and-

Bumblebee's voice _cracked_, bursting into outright _panic_, and he surged forward half a step, then he whirred in despair, pacing frantically left and right as he helplessly looked at Sam when-

"SAMMY!" Judy Witwicky screamed in fear when she laid eyes on her son, just in time to see him, and Simmons right behind him. And with the agent having one arm around his neck and the other holding a gun at Sam's temple, one did not need to possess a tactical computer to know what _that_ looked like. The fact that Sam was forcefully holding Simmons' arms in place while the latter was struggling to pull free from that compromising position only made it seem as if _Sam_ was struggling against _him_.

"Nooooooooh!" Darth Vader screamed from Bumblebee's radio.

Primus, _why_?

It was at that point that I truly regretted not bringing any high-grade Energon along on this mission. I will know better than to go against Ironhide's suggestion next time.

And how the frag did I recognize who that voice clip belonged to? Oh, I remember. Bumblebee watched a Star Wars marathon at a human 'drive-in theater' once and I learned of it in his subspace-transmitted holoreport.

I let out a whoosh of air from my vents. Why did I ever agree to this?

"Oh god oh god oh god oh god!" Simmons squeaked. His voice had well and truly taken a shrill nuance as he tried and failed to fight off both panic and Samuel's surprisingly firm grips at the same time. I thanked the stars that the boy had taken care to switch the gun safety on before he pulled this- "Madness!" Simmons wheezed in Sam's ear. "You're mad! Insane!"

I actually agreed with him. If nothing else, Sam had made human and Autobot see eye to eye. Perhaps that was the entire point? To unite us against the common foe which was his mental questionability? I was ready to believe anything at this stage.

"It's your fault, you know," Sam said between gritted teeth, too low for the humans next to me to hear.

"My fault?!" the man holding the gun shrieked. "How is this my fault!?"

"SAMMY!" Judy Witwicky proved her vocal capacities once more. I drily noted that we giant alien robots had suddenly become irrelevant compared to the sight of her son being 'held hostage.'

"If youuuungh didn't _act_ so much," Sam gasped out while keeping Simmons' increasingly frantic arms in place. "I'd've beeeennnghh able to figure out by now if you had a conscience." Simmons paused his struggles, either realizing Sam was stronger (deceptively so) or waiting for him to drop his guard. Or just to catch his breath, or perhaps all three, I was undecided. "But since even showing you exactly what you put Bumblebee through didn't seem to work, I'm left with having to take drastic measures."

"So what?" Simmons yelled from behind him, bravado swimming against the tide of shock. "You were just teaching me a lesson, is that it? Put me in his shoes?"

"Got it in one," Sam said. "Though you'll likely dismiss it as soon as possible because I'm too 'young' to know anything. Hence this." Simmons tried to pull away, but Sam was on to him. My sensors had long ago confirmed their chaotic vitals so I turned them off. "Come on, it's only fair. Go ahead. Negotiate from a position of _power_."

"He's crazy,' Mikaela blurted, shaking her head. "Hate to agree with that creep on anything, but he kind of is."

Judy gasped at her voice, at last noticing she existed, and Ron followed soon after. They both pounced on the girl, figuratively speaking, as though she was the only thing or person that made sense in that whole situation. And perhaps she was.

I did not envy her.

By that point, I had ignored too many uncertain comm hails so I sent my Autobots a data burst that explained the real state of things. Bumblebee's posture only marginally slumped in relief.

"Let go of my baby!" Sam's mother wailed. "My baby! Sammy, hold on!"

"No! _Don't_ hold on! Let go!" Simmons wheezed in Sam's ear. "Kid, why? Oh _why_ is this happening? What's the point?" He asked. I was fairly certain his despair was not totally fake even without my sensors.

"Well-!" Sam gasped wryly. "At this point I'm graspinnnggh at straws, so I figured that if you hhha-ave a problem with shooting a kid's brains out in front his mother, you might have a conngghhnscience after all. Unfortunately-"

-"Let go! Let go of my baby! Oh, if you harm even a hair on his head I'll kick your ass!"-

"-At this point I'm probably more useful as a human shield, so that plan is toast," Sam concluded hopelessly. "Guess this whole mess has backfired on us both, huh?"

Sam's father had taken to holding Judy back by this point.

Mojo woofed.

"Both? Both?!" Simmons shrieked. "Oh no. On no! You're not taking me down with you, brat!"

"Yeow!" Sam screamed and jumped away when Simmons sunk his teeth into his hand.

Ecstatic to be free of his hostage (those words should _not_ have been able to make sense, but they _did_), Simmons tossed the firearm and retreated from the apparently unstable teen.

"Sammy!" Judy yelled, breaking into a run with Ron right behind her, right when Samuel himself shouted. "You bit me! Are you crazy? You _bit_ me!"

"They _are_ nuts, both of them," Mikaela breathed.

"Me crazy! Am _I_ crazy!?" Simmons yelled at Sam, pacing left and right just like Bumblebee had been doing not that long before. Bumblebee who was now scurrying towards the boy and his fussing parents as quickly as his pedes allowed. He was almost upon them in fact, then Judy Witwicky noticed and- "Aaaaaah!" realized the giant alien robots had not been her imagination. "Ron!"

"Judy!"

"Dad-"

"Son-"

"- all nuts! Crazy!-"

"Sam-

"-all of'em crazy!-"

"Sam!"

"Mikaela-!"

I decided that even if I did have a long list of failures from which to choose something that could justify being put through this, I could take NO MORE. "**SILENCE!**"

The bullet-proof windows on every single van abruptly_ shattered_.

Then, nothing moved. Not even the wind. All was utterly still in this corner of the middle of nowhere, but something was still rankling, and I knew what it was. Making sure to glare at _everyone_ for at least half an Earth second, I turned my annoyed optics upon my weapons specialist.

Ironhide meekly turned off Pride and Joy, eliminating even that subsonic annoyance.

Peripherally, I noticed that Ratchet had gassed Mojo into unconsciousness. If he had been on a payroll, he would have received a bonus for that alone.

Primus be praised. Sweet peace and quiet at last.

I advanced on the humans, not even bothering to hide my irritation as it flashed in my optics and poured out like heat waves. I also did not bother telling them that the reason the glass shattered was because I emitted an ultrasonic burst meant for just that purpose. Let them assume it was my voice alone that caused it. "That is enough!" I snapped, and my sour mood was not fake. "We stay here and bicker while your world's doom looms! Shameful! Samuel!" He yelped and snapped to attention, even with his mother still clinging to him. "I appreciate what you tried to do, but there is a fine line between conquering people with reasoning and baffling them with nonsense. A line you have long since crossed!"

The boy bowed his head, and the only reason I did not feel bad for scolding him was because I had the sneaking suspicion he had been gunning for me to react this way from the very beginning. Either that, or it was his so-called intuition that led him to this, and the less I thought about _that_, the better. I was not altogether sure this _intuition_ he spoke of was such a wonderful thing anymore.

"Ron and Judy Witwicky," the parents warily looked up at me, looking every bit the part of children caught misbehaving. Just like Sam himself. "I understand your reactions, and admit that awakening to this situation was not something anyone would have been prepared for. However, your actions after you recovered your senses were unacceptable! Humans are taught as _children_ that losing one's temper and screaming never helps."

I expected the female, at least, to shoot something back, but the shattered car windows must have made an impression.

"Bumblebee." I was not keen on doing this to him, but it had to be said. "You knew full well Sam's parents would not react favorably to you essentially charging in their direction. They could not have known you shared their worry for Sam's wellbeing. They could not have known you only wanted to make sure he was safe and sound."

My scout bowed his helm and chimed, looking apologetic.

"Quite honestly," I cycled air through my vents in an effort to calm down, for all intents and purposes sighing. "The only one of you who faced this whole ordeal with any degree of sense was Mikaela Banes."

"Hey!" Simmons protested, but that only gave me the cue to start on _him_.

"And _you_, Seymour Simmons!" I rounded on him, and the man shrunk from my heavy gaze. "If you had just agreed to exhibit some of that reason and wisdom humanity likes to boast it possesses, Samuel would not have felt driven into a corner in his attempts to get you to listen to us for a few minutes. I am only thankful I was able to put a stop to this situation before he _truly_ went forward with his original plan. Which was to offer himself as a hostage in exchange for the freedom of the other three."

Even the tied-up agents still struggling in a heap in the background made a disbelieving, hive-like noise at that revelation.

The tension only got thicker when I revealed that bit of truth, and had it not been for my looming, seemingly angry frame and the persisting psychological effect of the shattered car windows, I have no doubt Samuel's parents would have started on him in some fashion.

"Why you… Why you… you…. God dammit, fine!" Simmons yelled and threw his arms in the air. "Say your piece! At this point I'm willing to believe anything is possible!"

"Umm…" Sam hedged, forcing the words through the air-stopping hug of his mother. "I already told you pretty much everyth-"

"NO!" Simmons yelled, turning at him and making cutting movements with his hand. "No! You shut up! I've heard enough from you so quiet! Stay silent! Don't say anything! Silencio! Digas nada mas, hombre! Capische?!"

"But-"

"No! If it's between a crazy kid like you and only _possibly_ crazy alien robots, I'll take my chances with them!" He even pointed a finger at me as he concluded that official pronouncement, still snarling at the boy. He looked like he had well and truly been pushed to the end of his rope, but he was gasping with the exertion and exhilaration of finally getting Samuel to stop speaking after such a long night.

Throwing another roaming glare, I reached up to the side of my helm and activated the hardlight hologram projectors in my optics. "Before time began, there was the Cube…"

I gave everyone the same story as the one I outlined to Samuel and Mikaela, but given Simmons' status and the high likelihood of him knowing of classified projects like the Ghost 1 starship, I added the story of the human vessel we encountered half a century ago in a different star system. It was a tactical risk, since the encounter resulted in the destruction of the ship and the deaths of the crew. But I doubted Sector Seven could like us any _less_ at this point, so even if Simmons took it badly it would make no difference even if we ended up being haunted by the ghosts of yesterday after this.

The reactions of the humans were a gratifying mix of interest in the story, worry over what it meant for Earth, and awe at the means of transmitting it. Simmons seemed to listen closely to everything I was saying, and I was pleasantly surprised to see his eyes narrow in consideration upon my sincere revelation of the Ghost 1's fate.

As I finished and let the hologram show the sight of the Cube for a time, I studied the reactions of my audience. My optic ridges came together when I noticed a glaring absence. Two of them in fact. Sam and Bumblebee. I knew the other Autobots were behind me, but my Scout was not in formation.

Unexpectedly, Jazz commed me. _:I'll go ahead an' project some more stuff. Maybe some music, or some bad stuff Megs did. You got somethin' to deal with, Boss.:_ He finished with a short-range locator beacon, so I looked where he indicated.

When I did, I wished I had not. No, I wished the sight that met my optics had not had to come to pass.

There they both were, quite a ways behind everyone. Sam was even out of sight of the cluster of agents, having hidden on the other side of a van from them. Bumblebee was kneeling and leaning over the human, cycling air through his vents for warmth but otherwise looking worried and frustrated at being able to do nothing else for the boy. The small, so _small_ now, organic that was curled on himself, covered by that large garment he'd pilfered. He was _shivering_ against the scout's knee plates. Trembling and breathing thinly as he wrestled with the panic attack he must have been holding back throughout that entire confrontation with the Sector Seven chief.

Even though I knew for certain Samuel had been counting on my reaction, the reaction that ended it all, I felt guilty and hollow. It was a horrible feeling, eerily similar in nature to the one I had experienced not that much earlier, when I let Bumblebee behind because _he knew the risks_. Just like _Sam_ knew the risks when he chose to do what he did.

What did it say about myself, that I let such things happen? That I let _younglings_…

I called my medic. _:Ratchet…:_

As I expected, he was aware of everything. _:Even if I had the necessary elements to synthesize them, applying sedatives at this juncture would be unwise. Especially with Samuel's unique physiology: _Ratchet somberly commed back.

Thankful that the other humans were still riveted on the hologram Jazz had taken over, I walked to where those two were clustered together. When I was close enough, I once again knelt, placing myself between them and the others, shielding the human from their view completely. "Sam…" I honestly did not know what to say. Thank you for taking your own kin to task over their treatment of us? Thank you for standing against prejudice? Thank you for putting yourself into the line of fire for our sake? How could I, when half my processing told me to tell him off for doing it all at his own expense?

My spark twisted on itself. Despite that I had focused on the relief provided by the fact that Sam had applied the safety on the gun before that last stunt, my processor dwelt on it now. Sam really had_ not_ been certain Simmons had a conscience when he made himself the hostage. The man could have taken the safety off and taken advantage of the situation, maybe even shot him at any time…

"I'm sorry," Sam murmured tiredly, and I realized he must have misinterpreted my half-lidded gaze and the continued presence of my battle mask. He thought I was disappointed in him rather than myself. "I know it was probably crazy, and I know you're probably mad I went too far. I can tell you think it speaks badly of you when you get angry, and I'm not proud I managed to make it happen, but… I know it's probably just me being a rebellious teenager talking, but I don't regret doing what I just did."

I vented, letting my helm drop and retracting my mask. "Sam." I met his eyes. "I am not mad-"

"You totally were," he told me, weariness in every syllable.

"_Were._" I overlooked his interruption because I was glad to see his panic attack receding. He did not have to put active effort into breathing steadily instead of hyperventilating now. "I… simply wish it had not come to this. You are too young to have to go through this, Sam." I paused, and when he did not bristle at being called young, I went on. "And I am upset I did not insist more on you revealing your plan. I can assure you I would not have allowed you to do even half of what you did, or put yourself in such a risk."

Sam laughed silently. "This wasn't the plan, if it could even be called that. I really _was_ going to do the hostage exchange thing. But then Simmons woke up and he _acted_. He just _acted_ and I decided I had to make it _stop_ before I even bothered trying to force the deal… I guess things just went from there."

Bumblebee hummed. I was surprised when I did not understand what he was trying to convey.

I was processing what next to say when, back where the other unbound humans were gathered, Simmons cursed. "Shit." He said heavily. "Shit." I turned my helm to see him pacing around the unmoving hologram of Megatron. The image was one of the many when my former bond-brother yelled or laughed at the heavens. Simmons was clearly disturbed by the sight, and there was no mistaking the recognition in this eyes. "Shit, shit, shit! We are in such _trouble!_"

And just like that, Sector Seven had become an ally. Temporarily or not, the organization that had hunted us and taken Bumblebee away for experimentation, and Primus knew what else, had become our _ally_.

I turned back to watch Sam, who was not in a position to see what I could see but had heard just fine. He was leaning, more steadily now, against Bumblebee. Relief and accomplishment practically _radiated_ from him. Sensing my gaze, he looked back and smiled contentedly.

I felt my previous guilt and regrets over everything I had witnessed throughout the night just… disappear.

He had _needed_ this. Needed to gain _victory_ over everything Simmons represented, both for our sakes and to prove to himself that he _could_. And he _had_.

The next 20 minutes consisted of Samuel's kin noticing his absence and reacting, as expected, by crowding him. He behaved as though he had not just had a nervous breakdown, and only Mikaela saw through the act. I noticed that she did not make good on her implied threat of killing him with knives, but it might have been only because she had none on her person. The time also allowed Simmons to go round and free his men, who then warily went to retrieve their handguns and communication devices one after another. It must have been quite an experience, seeing as Ratchet never left the immediate vicinity of the piles and kept running visually perceptible medical scans on them all just for the sake of it.

I was running scenarios through my processor for how best to go from here, with my Autobots chiming in when they could, when Simmons shouted from behind me. "Hey kid! Yeah, you the crazy one."

I looked down, where Samuel was now standing and answering questions for his parents while his mate held onto his arm and contributed with dry wit, both caustic and otherwise. "Yeah?" He showed no sort of discomfort in his reply.

Simmons looked at him for a while, then glanced between me and my other soldiers, before switching his attention back to Sam. "VIP treatment, huh?"

Sam grinned at his deliberately passive face. "And Mikaela's juvie record. Gone. Forever."

Simmons snorted and turned to walk off, lifting his reclaimed cellphone to his hear to make a call but still taking the time to put in the last word. "Kid's an extortionist."

This time around, the silence was not heavy at all.

Until Judy Witwicky spoke. "So… Juvie record huh?"

Then it was simply awkward.

For Mikaela at least. Sam was not fazed, and the unexpected but welcome joy I could feel warming my spark left no room for any discomfort anymore. Not when I had other thoughts to dwell upon. Such as that even if this all did end with my death and the insurance of my race's extinction upon the AllSpark's destruction… I could risk a hope that at least _humanity_, who was innocent in all this, would endure through it.

All because one human youngling had brutally taken a shredder to Seymour Simmons' skepticism and arrogant flippancy.

As I beheld him now, sheepishly explaining to his parents that the whole 'hostage thing' was just a misunderstanding, I realized that perhaps it was not too late to trust a hope that this war could finally end.

Who _are_ you, boy, that you can reignite my hope so easily? That was the thought that kept going through my mind.

_:…Sir?: _Bumblebee's tentative tone reached me through a private comm. Belatedly, I noticed that I had failed to acknowledge several data bursts sent to me through the shared connection by the others. My processor had wandered.

I was saved from replying by a tapping on my shin plates. Looking down, I saw the subject of my thoughts staring up at me. "You okay, Optimus?"

The other humans were hanging back, not nearly as brave or comfortable with us as Sam was. I suppose they feared we would kick or step on them, by accident or otherwise, if they surprised us.

"Yes." Actually no, I was not. And I had not been for a very, very long time, ever since I came upon the devastation at Tyger Pax and found Bumblebee with his throat torn apart. Even then I was not fine, as it had been hundreds of vorns before even that that Megatron severed our brother bond and left a permanent, never-to-be-healed wound behind. I would not be 'okay' even if the war finally ended one day, assuming I even survived to see it. But I felt _better_ that I did in dozens of vorns, and it was worlds apart from what I believed I could expect mere hours before, and that was enough.

Sam's eyes searched my optics for any deception, until he nodded, and again I felt that strange idea that he somehow understood.

It was absurd, I had not changed my mind on that, but I supposed even some absurd things turned out to be true once in a while.


	5. Arc I-5: Post-Mortem Assignment

**A/N: **I've started to drop hints about who Henry is. If you can guess before I post the next chapter, I'll allow the one doing the guessing to make a case in regards to whether or not I should include Miles Lancaster in this story, in any capacity. I won't promise to do it though. :P

Also, you can be sure I won't be turning Henry into some sort of story-stealer. Sam, Optimus and Bumblebee are the key characters here. Henry (or rather who he was before) is just here to sabotage the shit out of stuff for another chapter (or two if the word count gets away from me again).

* * *

**Chapter 5: Post-Mortem Assignment**

"-. .-"

You'd think that, after that nerve-wracking and, quite frankly, _draining_ stick measuring contest I had with Simmons, I'd be able to say things and events just blurred into one another. That's what usually happens after an adrenaline rush like that, right? Either that or falling asleep from the exhaustion of it all.

They didn't blur at all. Not the deflections I was able to somehow pull out of my ass when my parents started asking me question after question. Not the looks of perplexed and, amazingly enough, not-at-all-grudging approval that Ironhide kept shooting my way. Not the speculative curiosity that Jazz somehow transmitted. I have no idea how I was even able to see those feeling for what they were. It's not like Autobots had the same range of facial expressions as us, but I intuitively knew how they were feeling at the time.

Just like I now seemed to remember everything with total, crystal clarity. And I do mean _everything_, not just the way Bumblebee fussed over me, frantically trying and failing to curb my panic attack. I could vividly remember Ratchet's understated but oh so _vindictive _glee at having the chance to keep those agents off their game as he scanned them, one after another, when they went to get their weapons and cellphones. Mikaela's silent agreement to wait until we were in private before she questioned me. The way she kept my arm wrapped in both of hers as I talked to my parents, keeping up the charade of her being my girlfriend with such a natural air that I wondered if maybe I could dare think it wasn't all a charade anymore.

Even through the grime and sweat that clung to all of us, she still had a scent of lilac and jasmine about her.

I could remember perfectly the time it took my mom to finally let me out of the hug she'd pulled me in after I was no longer a 'hostage' – 2 minutes and 14 seconds – and I could say, right off the top of my head, how long the hologram had been kept up after Simmons – the asshole – finally agreed to use common sense and hear the Autobots' side of the story:

17 minutes and 12 seconds.

And out of _those_, 12 minutes and 2 seconds were all Jazz' doing, because Optimus Prime – Cybertron's honest-to-God _king_ – came over to where I was having a meltdown just so he could _kneel_ and hide me from sight until I got a grip on myself again. I wonder if he'll ever realize just how completely he blew my mind when he did that. That Bumblebee had been nearly panicking like I was ever since the holographic story started didn't even barely prepare me for that.

To be honest, I'd actually _expected_ Bumblebee to fuss over me as he did, since he'd been _assigned_ as my watcher and, for some reason I still couldn't figure out, he'd become attached to me. Become attached _before_ I became more than Sam Witwicky, high-school wimp and all around loser. I couldn't understand _why_ it had happened, but I could accept that it _had_.

But when that huge leader of an alien race came over, _knelt_ in front of me (I was still floored by how readily he seemed to do it in front of puny, fragile organics like us) and called my name in that… that aching tone I'd never heard before. For that one second, there had been _nothing_ majestic or out of reach in that deep, rumbling, rich, coolest voice _ever_. I hated it, and I _hated_ that I was the cause of it. It made sure the first thing I blurted out was an apology, even though I didn't regret what I'd just done.

I almost _did_ regret what I'd done. God, he'd been the only person there that didn't twitch when I pulled my gun on Simmons. He'd believed every step of the way that I wouldn't turn homicidal on him, believed in _me_ despite so much reason not to, but I _didn't_ regret it. Not after it worked and got them a free pass to the AllSpark. And I couldn't just lie to his face about it, even if I did end up sounding like a stubborn teen.

So I only apologized for making him mad, and he said he was upset with _himself_, not me.

Well, let's just say that I was glad my panic attack had left me drained, because otherwise I might have fallen into hysterics like Jazz had done earlier at the absurdity of it all. In the end, I laughed only a bit and babbled something about Simmons and acting, all the while forcing aside what was really on my mind before I really lost it again.

By the time the Sector Seven forces were able to get underway again, the Autobots had conferred privately over their comms and decided they would escort us all to the helipad where the Secretary of Defense was waiting for us (Who knew?). As Mikaela and I were riding in Bumblebee, following the once again moving Sector Seven vans, my parents were in Ironhide's cab. During the trip, after I managed to persuade Mikaela that I'd only bluffed to Simmons about acting dumb all my life, I had time to wonder if Optimus realized he was giving all our human saints a bad name.

Here was a giant alien robot that could have felt entitled to any and all feelings of superiority, that could have shot down he Sector 7 Forces or done God knows how many things, and he was the closest thing to a saint I had ever met. He defended us and our right to live with everything he had, and like any other saint he kept constantly putting himself down whenever anyone other than him suffered on his watch, even if it was by their own brashness.

Once at the site, I had quite a bit of fun seeing the reactions of the people there, especially those in the helicopter, when Bumblebee transformed into his bipedal mode right after we climbed out of the car.

When the others did the same, I didn't even bother hiding my grin at the humans' completely poleaxed expressions. I keep grinning all through the pleasantries that Secretary Keller and Optimus exchanged too. Well, Optimus offered pleasantries and Keller stuttered replies. Eventually, the Autobot leader took pity on my fellow humans and led his three officers away "for the sake of expediency" before anyone actually fainted like that Glen guy had as soon as Bumblebee transformed.

And the looks on the faces of the Sector Seven goons that weren't part of the convoy were _hilarious_ when Bumblebee climbed onto the trailer platform and transformed back into car mode, so he could be flown along with us. I'd have protested the idea, if Jazz hadn't made sure to shoot holes into every liquid nitrogen tank he could find before they all left. It put the humans on alert, but it also gave me the perfect chance to steamroll past Simmons before he could try and bullshit the SecDef.

I explain to Keller that "You see, sir, they don't want to risk one of their own being impaled, frozen alive, bound in chains, and taken for experimentation again, as it basically happened earlier after he exposed himself to save us from a gruesome death at Sector Seven hands. By the way, the US government isn't in the business of having people abducted in the middle of the night without any sort of charge right? Do-anything-and-get-away-with-it-badges aren't actually _real_, right?"

My mom had had some choice words to say about that, and she took advantage of Keller's open—mouthed, baffled outrage fully. Simmons had to usher her and my dad to a different helicopter get her to stop airing all the stuff he did to us.

I'm pretty sure I ruined _all _of Simmons' plans by doing that, since it made the SecDef glower at him mistrustfully and ask me questions about what had happened over the past couple of days. I'm pretty sure Simmons was going to spin the Autobot situation in a way that would make it look as if Sector Seven (and, thus, himself) had the "NBE situation" well in hand and could be trusted to handle the hostile ones that had been causing death and destruction. The 'Cons, I guessed, were responsible for that unexplained mass mobilization of the army that the news had reported the other day.

As if! I wasn't about to let _anyone_ exploit the Autobots, thank you very much! So I made sure to _not_ babble but still say as much as possible before the choppers took off and made it impossible for us to talk to each other without yelling our lungs out.

That had been 14 hours ago.

So now here I was, leaning against the hood of Bumblebee's alt form. Partly because I didn't want to leave him alone in case S7 tried anything, and partly because I couldn't sleep. We were in the Hoover Dam hangar closest to the section holding the peripheral living quarters, and I could quite honestly say I had lived through the fullest day of my life. I'd met a group of soldiers that happened to be the only survivors of a Decepticon attack on the Soccent military base in Quatar. I had been shown Magatroncicle. I had been shown the AllSpark (dear _God_, that Cube was enormous!). I had been interrogated by Keller in front of everyone there, extensively, and by the end of it he looked almost on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Captain Lennox had looked decidedly weirded out.

I couldn't blame him. I _was_ just a 17-year-old that apparently had ties to an alien race and information on which the fate of the entire world rested.

That wasn't what was bothering me though. What I kept getting back to was that, not long ago, I had lived through the creation of _life_ only to see it snuffed out right in front of me.

The Nokia-bot had never stood a chance. I honestly hoped it hadn't been what I think it was. I knew Frenzy hadn't been anything even close to the equivalent of a Cybertronian kid, but that Nokia bot had literally been alive for only a minute or so before it was destroyed. Granted, the way it immediately produced guns from somewhere and tried to shoot the closest person didn't really support the idea of a newborn, but who knew? Maybe Autobots and Decepticons were born that way? Not like that little gun had much chance of harming adult robots after all…

I was glad Mikaela wasn't there to see me wonder about it. I wasn't supposed to be there either actually, since we'd all been shown to some living quarters not long after Tom Banacheck's ever so wonderful (and patently incriminating) tour of the place. I stayed by Mikaela's bunk until she fell asleep, but after I went to my own room I couldn't do the same. I was _tired_, sort of, but not _sleepy_ for some reason. I wouldn't have been surprised if we'd been locked in, but I guess Simmons wouldn't dare do anything like that after the SecDef chewed him out for keeping all this a secret. And the Rangers didn't look all that happy either, and they were stationed in the same corridor.

Well, technically. I was pretty sure they'd given up on sleep a while ago too.

Optimus and the other Autobots were due to arrive the next morning, and the SecDef had probably been on the phone with the president the whole day. The plan was to coordinate and figure out what to do once the Prime and his men arrived (assuming we were lucky enough to not be found by the Decepticons before then). Bumblebee (who, at my insistence, had been present for the whole tour and had hissed at Megatron's frozen form) had looked like he was itching to just go to the cube and take it away, or do something, but I don't know what he thought he could do to that humongous thing. But Simmons managed to say they shouldn't rush things for now, since Sector Seven had been studying it for a long time and it would be dangerous to move it, because it produced random energy surges when it impacted anything.

I'm pretty sure Keller only agreed to get him off his back until he straightened his own thoughts out, got rid of his headache, talked to the president and figured out what to do. On that note, I was pleasantly surprised that blonde woman, Maggie Madsen, was actually in _favor_ of letting the Autobots take the cube away, however they planned to do it…

I was, of course, completely in favor of that. It's not like the AllSpark staying in human hands had done all that much good. Even all the latest technology had been reverse-engineered from Megatron, not the Cube. It had nothing to do with the artefact. And anything had to be better than bringing things to life just so they could be killed.

"You are troubled."

All of a sudden, I realized that Bumblebee had stopped playing music quite some time ago. The engine vibrated faintly under the hood, and when I looked up from where I was staring at a crack in the concrete floor I understood why. "Oh. It's you." I heard the engine rev a bit, but Bumblebee didn't otherwise express his surprise at my recognition. "Did your intuition tell you that?"

My sarcasm didn't seem to affect Henry at all. "Nope. I guessed it from what you were doing."

"And what was I doing?" I wondered if he realized just what the car really was. Probably. He'd been there when 'Bee transformed and saved us after all.

"Brooding." He was being way too casual about this. "It doesn't suit you, lad." Lad? What had happened to _kid_? "You're too young for it." I couldn't help but glower. "That doesn't suit you either."

"Tough."

Henry (last name Matthews apparently) turned serious. "Before you unfairly take out on me whatever frustration you gathered up today, can I at least know _why_ you look like you're about to bite my head off?"

I pushed away from the car, standing straight. "You sure you don't already know?" I stuffed my hands in the pockets of the military fatigues we'd been provided. "You seemed to be doing fine in that area last night."

"_I'm_ not the all-knowing one, lad."

I took my time to look at him. He still wore a suit, but without the upper piece. He had a white shirt on, (I still had my black jacket over a white polo shirt) and he also had a tie, with a black, calf-length trench coat over everything, open at the front. He pulled badass formal in a way I couldn't help but envy, though I didn't show it. "I'd ask how much you knew about all this, but I'm pretty certain the answer to that is 'everything' right?"

The self-proclaimed spy hermit raised an eyebrow. "That's a loaded question. Everything can mean a lot of things."

"Will you just stop it?" I snapped at him. Distantly, I wondered if I was really as immune to the astral plane as he said I was if I could still get so riled up. "You know what I mean!"

"I do, and I told you before why I'm so deliberately obtuse sometimes."

I sighed. Really, out of everybody I'd met over the past few days, Henry was probably the last person I should be angry at. "How could you just do _nothing_ about those experiments?" I was surprised at how strained by voice had gotten. Did it really bother me that much? "They just… they brought it to life just so they could subject it to more and more radiation. To see how much it could take before…" I gestured helplessly as Bumblebee's engine revved in concern behind me.

The agent walked to me – he'd been keeping a good distance until that point – and Bumblebee took that as his cue to transform and loom behind me threateningly. I couldn't help but grin, and wondered just how Bumblebee would take it if I told him I found it more endearing than scary.

Henry just approached all the way until he was a couple of paces in front of me, though he did keep his eyes on the Bot all the while. "You must be the adorable one of the bunch, aren't you?"

Bumblebee's broken vocalizer beeped in bafflement, and I couldn't quite smother a laugh at seeing his scary bodyguard act so easily blown off.

Henry returned his gaze to me. "The Nokia bot wasn't really alive. Or at least not really sentient. Intelligent, yes, but nothing more than a particularly sophisticated AI. A murderous drone."

I _wanted_ to believe it but. "How can you be sure? You weren't there. Or did you witness past experiments and poof! You just decided it was true and left it at that." My tone wasn't _totally_ non-hostile.

Those black eyes narrowed. "Walk with me." Without even waiting for my assent or refusal, he turned and strode off. After a moment, I rushed to catch up, and Bumblebee was hot on our tail

"Tell me something," Henry did not seem to care a giant robot was stalking us. "You came into contact with _Them_ earlier, did you not?"

I threw a glance behind me, where Bee was clearly confused by our conversation. "I thought you said I was supposed to keep everything a secret until tomorrow."

"You, yes, and you'll do it," the man said, oddly certain I'd do as I said despite that no binding promise had been made. "Not _me_ though. So, I'll ask again. You came into contact with _Them_, yes?"

"… Yes." I looked away. I wistfully wondered if I'd ever experience that again.

"So, do you accept that they're all-seeing?"

Ignoring the growing confusion in the voice box of the robot following us, I peered at Henry, wondering why he didn't say all_-knowing_. "I guess so."

"Well!" Henry turned on his heel and faced me, coming to a stop right at the mouth of the tunnel leading towards the main section of Hoover Dam. "Why, then, do you think they would bother having an incarnated agent infiltrate the ranks of an organization like Sector Seven? Regardless of the fact that the one life I still remember, the one right before this one, had a lot to do with them? Why would they send someone in if they already know everything about it? What would be the point?"

That… that was actually a good question. "Erm…" Intuition? Maybe a little help? "So you could sabotage it?" No help at all. Damn.

Henry snorted in amusement. "Not hardly." He resumed his trek, and so did I. An increasingly flabbergasted Bumblebee followed us as we entered the well-lit tunnel. "That was just part of the way I chose to interpret the parameters of my mission for this life." He met my eyes. "Which was to make sure Sector Seven didn't do more harm than good."

A wave of relief washed over me. Somehow I knew I could, at least, believe _him_. "So those little bots-"

"Were just drones." Henry nodded. "Sparkless. _Soulless_." He made sure to hold my gaze again. "I can assure you that if the people here really _were_ about to decide to create babies just to experiment them to death, I'd have brought this entire dam crashing down decades ago."

I blinked at that brazen claim, then threw a worried glance at the cameras dotting the roof of the tunnel.

Henry laughed. "Come now, lad, do you really think I came to you _without_ first feeding a looping slice of film to the security network keeping watch over this area of the dam?" I gaped while Bumblebee clicked his voice box. Seriously, how else was I supposed to react? "Or did you think I came here on orders? As a chaperone maybe? A guide meant to take you on a more thorough tour of this base? It is past midnight."

It did sound kind of silly when he put it like that I guess, but… "Why not?" I still challenged. "Simmons did say he'd give us VIP treatment."

Henry tossed Bumblebee a backwards glance, before looking at me again, though his fast stride did not waver. "Because you_ clearly_ expect him to live up to his word." He knew, of course, why I decided to stick with Bumblebee. That it wasn't just boredom and lack of sleep on my part. "Don't judge Seymour too harshly though." I blinked, surprised. "There's more to him than obfuscating stupidity. And he's been doing better than his grandfather. Walter Simmons created this organization from an obsession. Other than his unhealthy fascination with the cube, he had a total hatred of all things robotic and alien. It took the death of his son – who he'd _forced_ into service with S7 – and two of his friends being saved by a Decepticon – from the same explosion that lost him his son – to realize that he was looking at all these robotic life forms through the same, unfair lens."

I mouthed silently at that all too unexpected revelation for a few minutes. That… wasn't there some sort of secrecy protocol supposed to be involved? Wasn't this classified information? "So what? You're saying that just because he didn't actually _give_ any orders to harm us, he should be trusted? Me and Mikaela almost died anyway! He was going to torture and experiment on Bumblebee! Not to mention everything else!"

The hermit spy gave me a surprisingly dry look. "And I'm sure _you_ immediately assumed the best of your car when it started acting strange."

I flushed and looked pointedly forward. My now crystal-clear memory rolled back to the day before yesterday, when I called Miles on the phone to tell him Satan's Camaro was stalking me.

Yeah. _So_ not helping.

"I'm not advising you to trust him. _I_ wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. I'm just trying to cut the momentum from under your resentment before it gets too bad."

"Gee, thanks!" I deadpanned, but inside I actually was a bit thankful, even if I didn't quite understand why.

A sizzling crackle pulled my attention to the back. "S-zzt Ssaam-" Bumblebee winced and shook his helm, then reverted to the radio. "_What's all this, then?"_ An old man's voice asked. _"I don't get it!" _And that was a kid.

I felt a bit bad about it, but while I hadn't _promised_ anything, I'd still kind of given my word, so until tomorrow we'd have to live with whatever Henry decided to just blurt out in front of the yellow Camaro. "Sorry, 'Bee. I really can't say until tomorrow night. Besides, it's not important to your mission. I mean, you've pretty much completed it right? You scouted Earth and found the AllSpark. Now you just need to rendezvous with your commanding officer, which will happen in a few hours."

The yellow car-bot seemed to slump in disappointment, and I almost caved at that pleading pair of optics and the warble of the vocalizer. "That's unfair, 'Bee. Now you're making me feel bad."

The radio came to life again. _"Yeah? – Well you __**should**__ be sorry!"_ Bee _pouted._ Somehow. Even without much of a mouth plate. He crossed his arms too, looking away from me as he kept walking along with us.

I sighed. "I'll make it up to you after we reach…" I stopped talking and turned to Henry and asked. "Where _are_ we going?"

"This tunnel leads from the entrance hangar directly to the rec room." Simmons had insisted that Bumblebee not come anywhere deeper into the dam if at all possible. I assumed we were assigned _that_ particular wing of living quarters due to the same logic. Clearly, Henry didn't give a rat's ass. "A fortunate coincidence that the architects designed the place that way." He looked at the bot that was now walking _alongside _us, across me from him. "You'll be glad to know that lots of things were brought to the place over time, and the need to allow tow vehicles in and out made sure the room had a large, hangar-like entrance of its own."

Bumblebee gave the agent a long, measuring look, then pinned me with his optics. _"I still say – None of'em can be trusted._" He moved closer as we walked, but looked ahead of us, glaring up at the cameras.

Well, I was pretty sure Henry could be trusted. Besides, he'd deliberately led us through the vehicle access tunnel Bee fit in, instead of, say, inviting me to follow through the adjacent, human-sized corridors I was sure existed. Speaking of which. "How much farther now?"

"Oh, about 10 minutes of quick walking!" The man, much to my consternation, said all too glibly. He did toss Bee a speculative look though. "Unless your friend has a better idea? Though I can't imagine he'd want anyone from Sector Seven inside his cabin."

Be stopped, prompting us to do the same. He stared (glared really) at the crazy hermit. I could almost _feel_ him weighing the risk of letting Henry ride inside him against the certainty of me getting a foot ache by the end of this walk. _"No touchy!_" He raised a servo and wiggled his digit as if telling 'no' to a kid asking for candy. _"You touch, you die."_

Henry nodded all too seriously for someone who was being threatened with death by a 17-foot-tall mech. I wasn't even sure Bee was completely joking either. "Then I assume you have a device that can generate an insulating field around my body."

Utterly baffled again, Bumblebee stared at me in helpless confusion. I sighed. "Well you did say he shouldn't touch anything. Presumably, you have a way to enable that _and_ drive him there."

The bot slumped in exasperation at having his joke turned on him and transformed without another radio blip. Both doors popped open in invitation. _"Nothin' to see here, Move along!"_

I got into the driver's seat and the seatbelt settled over me on its own, not too tight and not too loose. Henry smiled indulgently at me, then the headboard before fastening his himself. Bee barely gave him a second after he was done before tires screeched against the asphalt and we took off at a speed no one would consider healthy or safe.

"So," Henry asked me after a short while, not at all stiff from speed fear in his seat, unlike me. "I take it you haven't felt the need to sleep since last night?"

For a moment, I forgot to be worried about how fast we were going. "… I guess?"

He nodded. "I suspected this might happen, which is why I checked the cameras. The agent in the monitor room fell into a light nap, poor thing."

Which probably meant he'd used that gas, or something similar (maybe odorless?) to do his camera hijacking thing. "How on Earth has your duplicity not been discovered yet?"

"What duplicity?" Henry asked all too seriously. "I work for no man or organization other than Sector Seven."

Well, Gods, Angels, Saints or Ascended Being, whatever they were called, weren't _men_ or organizations at all, so I supposed he really wasn't lying. "So what about sleeping?"

"A necessary downtime for those subsisting on inefficient fuel." He looked at me. "Technically, or ideally, we should be able to subsist on the energy around and 'above' us, instead of having to decompose physical substances. The Astral plane and the murkiness of earth-grown nutrients makes it hard though, hence the need for food, and for time when we use less energy and fuel than we replenish, ergo sleep."

"Huh." Imagine that. "So I don't need to sleep anymore."

"I imagine the frequency of you needing sleep will decrease greatly, perhaps disappear completely eventually if you avoid certain substances and learn meditation and its true purpose." Henry shifted in his seat. I noticed that his seatbelt was a bit looser now. Had Bee pulled it uncomfortably tight just to make a point? "It all depends on you and how you chose to move from here."

Sleepless nights sounded boring. Then again, this was like the healthy version of insomnia, and if I really had perfect memory as I suspected I guessed I could figure out stuff to do in the night. "I don't suppose you have any ideas or reading materials on that?"

"Later," Henry gestured with a hand. "We're here."

Bumblebee didn't even try to be discreet as he just drove through the large, surprisingly open, entrance to the rec-room. He did come to a stop though, but while Henry got out quickly enough, Bee refused to let my seatbelt unfasten. He even closed his doors to keep me in. "What's wrong, 'Bee?"

There was some silence, then. "…_ I'm worried – He's a strange one – What was that about?"_

Sam ducked his head and sighed. "I _can't_ tell you… well I can, but to be honest I feel I should do as he asks and keep quiet for now. And I think there are still things he wants to tell me." The seatbelt didn't come off. "Look, you must've figured out he's the one that got us free, right?" A hesitant burst of static confirmed it. "Let's just see what he wants, alright? So far, he's helped us. And if you find things too boring, you can link to Optimus and report on all this, yeah?" I was pretty sure he'd already composed a report, if not already sent it out, no matter my feelings on the matter. Optimus _was_ his commanding officer, and I honestly believed the big bot fully deserved the loyalty of his followers, but I had a feeling me saying I didn't mind would make a difference. Relieved Bumblebee of any guilt he might feel at infringing my privacy.

I got my confirmation when the seatbelt unbuckled and the door opened. "Thanks for understanding, Bumblebee. I'll try not to worry you in the future."

A pleased beep was my answer to that one.

When I came out of the car, I looked around the place. The rec room was huge, about the size of a gym really. Actually, it looked like a cross between a gym and a rec room, with a bar and a few tables on one side, and areas for various games taking up most of the space. There was a bowling alley, some pool tables, even a basketball field. "This can't be the only rec room." It would get way too loud for some people if all those facilities were used at once. At least there was a large TV there, up on the wall above the bar.

Damn, Hoover Dam was huge.

"There are a few others, but access is restricted to the higher ups," Henry confirmed.

The Rec Room was not as empty as I expected or hoped. William Lennox and some of his rangers were there as well, including his second in command Robert Epps. They didn't come over though. They stayed where they were, although they did give the two of us curious looks, then amazed and wary ones when Bumblebee transformed. Even though they'd all seen it before.

Henry ignored them all as he led the way to the far side of the Rec Hall (rec room seemed too small a term). There was something like a track… or just a long strip of bare space. There was also a row of lockers next to the wall.

"Why are we here?" I predictably asked. "Because I doubt it's to play around."

"Actually, that's part of it." Henry busied himself with the locker right at the edge of the row. It opened to reveal… Horse shoes? What? "What."

Bumblebee chimed in confusion behind me. He even walked forward, past me, to peer suspiciously at the two horseshoes Henry took with him. Wait, was he scanning them for explosives? Talk about paranoia.

Looking to my left, I realized there _was_ a stake some distance away from us. "You gotta be kidding," I told the man. "You brought us here to play _horseshoes?"_

"Unbelievable, isn't it?" The agent quipped. "But I suppose the answer is yes."

I stared at him. What else could I have done really? "You have issues." Well, maybe that was a bit harsh. "You _are_ joking right?"

"Not in the least."

I actually _had_ played horseshoes in the past, but I always sucked at it, mostly because I could never get into the game enough to _care_ about even trying to aim the things properly. "I played before and didn't like it."

Henry grinned smugly and held the horseshoe in his right hand up. "Not like this you haven't." A flick of the wrist and-

I stared, stunned and awed by how the thing _spun_ on his index fingertip like a freaking _basketball._

It kept spinning for about ten seconds before the crazy man suddenly jerked his hand up, grabbed it by the middle _perfectly_ and tossed it aside, without even looking where he was throwing it.

The horseshoe hit the very top of the stake and took three full seconds to spin all the way to the floor.

And about twenty seconds after _that_, I realized I was gaping, mouthing silently because I just had no words.

That should _not_ have been possible!

Looking as pleased with himself as after he scryed Ironhide's endearing (-ly hilarious) planetfall, Henry reached out and pushed the other horseshoe in my left hand. "Now, you give it a go."

Almost sputtering, I looked from the horseshoe to him and back a few times. Risking a glance up to my right, I was gratified to at least see _some_ astonishment on Bumblebee's face plates. Although it might have just been for my benefit. "Right. So we came all the way here just so I can suffer something humbling I suppose?"

Henry seemed honestly surprised. "Eh?"

"You know, to be shown I'm not the best thing since sliced bread? To ensure I don't become arrogant? Isn't that what old people do to us youngsters? Especially after some astonishing revelation about ourselves?"

The hermit agent blinked. "Maybe some other time." Then something passed over his face. "Though probably not." He shook his head and gestured towards the stake. Or pole. Whatever. "Just try it. Once. That's all I'm asking."

With a sigh that must have been more dramatic than warranted, I turned to look at the pole. Or _tried_, but Henry reached out to stop me. "Not like that. The way I did it. Do that."

"… You're crazy. _No _one can do that!" This time, _he_ aimed deadpan stare at _me_. "No one can do that just by seeing it once!" I amended.

Not saying anything, Henry crossed his arms and _gazed_ patiently at me.

Sighing again, I looked skywards and lifted the hand holding the horseshoe. I flicked the object between my fingers, twisting my wrist abruptly, and waited for the noise of metal rattling against the wooden floor, but when it didn't come I looked at my hand.

Holy _shit_!

I don't know _how_ I didn't jerk in fright and throw it off, but somehow I didn't. There it was, the horseshoe, spinning like a twister on my fingertip, and kept doing it for 6 seconds, 7, 8, 9, 10-

I snatched the horseshoe between my fingers and lashed out, tossing it to the side without even looking.

The horseshoe hit the very top of the stake and took three full seconds to spin all the way to the floor.

And about twenty seconds after _that_, I realized I was gaping, mouthing silently because, once more within the span of just three minutes, I had absolutely no words.

After getting over my shock, I looked around warily, then with resignation when I saw Lennox and the others staring at me in barely disguised amazement.

"And _that_," Henry said, sounding distinctly pleased with himself. "Is called adoptive muscle memory!" I still had my jaw hanging when I looked at him again, but he was focused on the stake now. "And to think it took me two days of practice to get that trick down." He rubbed his chin, completely ignoring us, even Bumblebee who was clicking and gesturing, pointing between me and him with his digit. His helm kept turning as if watching a tennis match. "Although adoptive muscle memory is a pretty silly choice of words, since muscle memory isn't really _muscle_ memory. It's still stored in the brain, or rather the mental plane for you."

With sheer force of will, I clamped my mouth shut and lifted my hand in front of my face to stare at it in shock some more.

And the crazy hermit spy chose that, of all times, to drop the rest of the bomb. "And you did it with the left hand instead of the right like me! Your mind can perfectly replicate and adjust for mirrored movements! Your integration and balance between the mental and physical bodies is even more advanced than mine!"

"…"

Holy _shit_.

Dear _God_, what a _hack_!


	6. Arc I-6: Baptism by Water

**A/N: **I've decided to provide what I think are appropriately cool themes for certain scenes.

So, humor me. Go to YouTube and look up "Revenge of the fallen: Forest Battle" and have it ready to start playing for when Sam and Bumblebee finally part ways with Henry in this chapter. You can even look for the Abbreviated version (49 seconds) and put it on repeat (www dot listenonrepeat dot com).

I hope you'll tell me if I put enough foreshadowing previously in regards to who Henry is.

* * *

**Chapter 6: Baptism by Water**

"-. .-"

My back made a thud against the thick mat, but I didn't hear it over the sound of my undignified gasp. This had to be the fourth time in a row that I got thrown off my feet. Why was I doing this again?

The neon light on the ceiling above provided no answer, but I got one anyway. After all, I had perfect memory now: after the event than I'm pretty sure will henceforth be known as "The Horseshoe Epiphany," (Robert Epps thought he was funny, the ass), Henry left to "deal with something" and left me in the "care" of Will Lennox and his Rangers. And he made sure not to disappear without throwing an off-hand remark about how I'd probably learn to fight really fast if I got to observe and _experience_ combat in a controlled environment.

The Rangers clearly didn't know what to think of Henry, and I half-expected them to refuse, to say they don't have time, or that they didn't come here to babysit a kid. But Lennox gave me that strange, calculating look of before, and there was something else in it too, but I don't know _what_. Then he asked me, completely seriously, if I'd try to see if I could get the hang of things if they provided some demonstrations.

I remember being honestly surprised. "Wait, you mean you'll do it? Just like that?" I blame Simmons for making me believe the worst of people.

"Well, the night has to pass somehow," Lennox said, completely unperturbed by the yellow mech standing behind me and scrutinizing him. "We're not keen on sleeping anyway, may as well do something with the time. Besides, you're an asset, and if his behavior is any indication," the soldier nodded in Bumblebee's direction "a really important one. So any opportunity to increase your chances of not dying is good." He stretched and cracked his neck, rising from the chair he'd been nursing a beer from. He smirked. "Just don't let it get to your head."

"I'm _sure_ you'll be quick to pop my ego if that happens," I said dryly.

The first half an hour wasn't so bad. I got to see Lennox and his men, but especially Epps, spar in turns against one another. They used military hand-to-hand with Judo mixed in, although Epps also seemed to know some sort of street fighting.

Then they demonstrated the moves more slowly, and had me replicate them. I got them all on the first try, much to their (and my) collective amazement. And much to their envy too, which they had no trouble expressing, probably because there was no spite or malice in it. These guys really were something else.

Sparring, however, was a different story. I held my own well enough when they went easy, but afterwards I kept getting my ass kicked. Well, not exactly, I _did_ manage to hold my own against Epps, more or less. For a minute or so anyway. But while I _did_ have a physical constitution on par with the best of them, I was still pretty slim and short – I still had a growth spurt to go through, hopefully – and there were two things I didn't seem to just gain from the onset: reflexes and battle instincts.

So yeah, I'd just gotten thrown off my feet again.

As I lay there, catching my breath, I couldn't get it out of my head that this was all Henry's fault.

After I lifted myself from the ground, we started again, with kicks, punches, attempted grabs, the works. Eventually I managed to pull something off. I side-kicked. It was a feint, but it worked. It let me go in close and grapple with Will, so now I just had to twist my hips, bend forward and _pull _–

The throw worked, and Lennox flew over my shoulder, but instead of him landing on his back he managed to twist too, in mid-air, landing on his feet and reversing my grip, basically doing to me what I'd just tried to do to him.

I gasped, falling on my back for the fifth time.

Bloody scrapping hell.

Lennox was standing over me, eyes narrowed. "Kid, what did I tell you?"

I sighed and climbed to my feet. "Don't try to think too much about how to move, just let it happen naturally?"

"That's right."

"Yeah, well, I'm trying!" I snapped. Maybe it was childish to react that way, but I was becoming frustrated.

"I can see _that_."

I stopped before I could start ranting and took a good look at him. The guy was being serious.

Lennox kept looking at me and frowning, then he asked me, completely out of the blue. "What's the square root of 67 multiplied by four divided by 29?"

I blinked, completely thrown off by the non sequitur. I exchanged a glance with Epps, who looked just as baffled as me. Looking to my right, I saw Bumblebee gazing curiously at us. He shrugged, doorwings twitching slightly. Seeing that I wasn't going to get any help, I turned to behold the captain again. "Erm… square root of just 67 or of the whole thing?"

"The whole thing. Actually, forget it. Give me the square root of this: 78 multiplied by four divided by 66."

"4.48447999." I didn't even take a second. "Assuming I only take into account the first four decimals of the result of the division."

Silence.

"…. Damn." I should have known Epps would drawl that. Really.

Will looked at Bumblebee. "Is that right?"

Bumblebee blinked (er, shuttered his optics?) and nodded. _"We have a winner!"_ The radio cheered.

"Hmm," Lennox scratched his cheek. "Okay. Let's try this a different way." He turned around and led the way to the middle of the area laid down with soft mats. "Feel free to think about what to do as much as you want." He turned to face me properly and got ready, fists up in a standard boxing stance. "Actually, think as much as possible. Ready?"

I hesitantly loosened some knots in my back and mirrored his pose. "Well, I guess we'll know when we start."

"Okay. Here we go. Think fast!"

"What th-!" I barely dodged a right hook, then leaned out of the way of a left punch and brought my arm down to block a kick to my side. Will pulled it back but kicked again without even catching his footing, almost hitting me in the face. I blocked again, guard stiff but firm.

Will drew back, spun on his heel and sent a spin kick straight at my chest, quick as a snake-

The world slowed down, and I _thought_. Observed. Studied. _Analyzed_. All the observations I'd done of their spars, and all the fights I was ever involved in, all of them came together and I _processed_ it all in less than an instant. My eyes took in my surroundings, my ears, smell and touch making up for the rest. The consistency of the mat was gauged: worn but serviceable, impact on balance minimal. The speed of will's leg, calculated. The distance to the walls, measured. The time the foot would contact my chest: 0.06 seconds. Variables scrolled through my head, assumptions were made and discarded.

I leaned back and to the left, right hand strafing up, and caught the foot, fingers aimed _inwards_ and _twisted._

Will's eyes widened, but he rolled with the move, jumping, spinning horizontally in the air. He landed on his arms and managed to send a kick to my head as he cartwheeled. _Capoiera_ I recognized. That Fig guy they'd been talking about must have taught him. I ducked, blocked an oncoming punch, then another, then struck a front kick aside. All the while I noted the increase in the rate of hits. Soon enough he'd stop holding back and-

I had to cross my forearms to stop a punch to my sternum. Then came another – left cheek, blocked – kidney –averted – Will reached forward, grabbing my wrist and spinning to press his back against me, one arm reaching back over my shoulder, grabbing the back of my shirt, the other hand on my arm -

Suddenly, I was airborne.

Then I was facing upwards, air rushing by my ears. I knew the ground was approaching from behind and below, and my brain instantly calculated the speed, sending signals to my limbs as needed.

I didn't gasp this time, because my back never hit the mat. Looking up, I was gratified to see Lennox's astonishment at how I stopped my fall with my feet, legs bent at a right angle the knees. But I didn't give him time to do more than that. I'd already estimated how much strength I'd need to put in my kick, how to turn my spine, how to _pull_ on his oh-so-helpful hold on my forearm, how tight to hold onto Will's own when he inevitably tried to drop me – there!

I was in the air, and this time it was all me. I'd never done even the slightest cartwheel before, but now I did a spinning side-flip like I'd done it all my life, almost flying over Lennox and pulling his arm along. I landed gingerly, Will's arm twisted overhead as I went, and now _I_ was behind him, and all I had to do was pull on his arm hard enough to make him arch his back, then reach back and _throw_ him up with my only free hand against the small of his back.

For the first time in that entire night, the gasp that came was not mine. Will Lennox met the mat face-first after being flipped backwards head over heels. Air came out of his lungs in a sudden, painful gust.

Silence.

Well, almost.

"… Holy mother of god." Epps breathed from the side.

Dramatic much?

I let go and scrambled away from the downed soldier. I was pretty sure he still hadn't been putting everything he had into it, so if he decided to up the ante I wanted it to be on my terms, not his. I _didn't_ think he'd try and cheap shots, but better safe than sorry.

Will groaned and slowly began to climb to his feet, wincing as he moved his shoulder. Daring to look around, I took in the varying reactions of my audience, ranging from understated astonishment to perplexed stupefaction. Bumblebee gave me a thumbs up in the background, _We Are the Champions_ playing at a volume low enough to add to the mood without snapping everyone else out of their various states.

Once again standing, Lennox looked around and nodded at the less-than-aware states of his men as though he both expected and approved of the situation. "Right. Snap out of it!" He snapped his fingers a few time, prompting his men to blink and regain their wits. "Go on, back to the table with you. Get." With a last glance in my direction, they all left. Then Lennox faced me again and smirked. "Improvising?"

I laughed nervously. "Ah ha ha... Whatever works?"

The captain of the rangers nodded grimly. "Good." He turned around and headed back to the table he'd been sitting in when I first came in with Bumblebee. But he did look back to say one last thing. "You've got a good head, kid. Don't lose it."

"What he said."

"Gaaah!" I jumped a foot in the air, and I thanked the stars for my now perfect sense of balance because without it I doubt I'd have managed to avoid falling on my ass. I ignored the snickers of the soldiers. They must have thought I wouldn't hear, but I did. My hearing had gotten better, like everything else about me. Whirling around, I glared at the all too innocent looking man that had somehow snuck up behind me. "Don't _do_ that!"

"What? Don't speak?"

I opened my mouth to tell Henry exactly how I felt about that reply, but Bumblebee beat me to it. _"Don't speak. I know what you're thinking, I don't need your reasons, Don't tell me 'cause it hurts…"_

I turned my glare on the yellow mech. "Not. Helping!"

'Bee ducked his head bashfully, but I had the sneaking suspicion he was still laughing at me. The way his doorwings quivered made me think he was tittering, but I couldn't know for sure, and I had a feeling 'Bee knew that too.

Damn cultural barrier.

All of a sudden, I got the strong urge to enunciate something snippy in his own language. That would shut him up nicely. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I didn't know where to even begin to make those electronic noises and rumbles with my human vocal cords. A shame, too, since Ironhide had provided me with such a _wonderful_ set of swearwords and curses.

Wryly, I noted that it figured it would happen that way. That my first exposure to an alien language, the exposure which also happened to reveal to me that I actually _understood_ it, would consist of what was probably the most refined instance of cussing in the language's history.

Thirteen multi-phrase curses hurled at Jazz. All of them transmitted in a single, nine-second burst.

Releasing an exasperated but also resigned breath of air, I faced Henry again. "Back from whatever errand you were on?"

The crazy hermit made for one of the free tables and I decided I may as well walk with him. Bumblebee followed us, naturally. "I would have been back faster, but I got a message from one of my colleagues that Tom wasn't being himself."

"Tom?" Tom who… oh. "Tom Banachek?" Why did I not like the sound of that?

Henry kept his eyes forward. "Simmons may be in charge of apprehending so-called 'NBEs' and such, and the head Sector Seven's field agents as a whole, but Banachek is the one actually _leading_ this organization. He also happens to, as you might say, _not_ be an asshole." He eyed me askance, and when I didn't snort or anything, he continued. "And he's just learned that the robot he's been conducting live dissection and experiments on is not, in fact, just a mindless space exploration drone. Even without knowing it was an evil doombringer, it would be bad enough on its own, but it also made him rethink what the other experiments might have been about."

I blinked, and my blood chilled as the realization steadily descended over me. "Oh hell…"

Henry nodded. "Yes. Recall your own reaction to seeing those experiments. Now imagine that you've suddenly been given a pretty good reason to think those really were cybernetic babies. Imagine that you've been there for the many dozens of experiments/executions/deaths-by-torture that were conducted in the past. And imagine knowing that _you're_ the one that ordered each and every one of them for the past three decades."

I said nothing. Not just because I had no idea _what_, but because my throat had closed up.

We reached the table, and Henry put his briefcase on it. "He's in the observation deck, just staring at Megatron." He unfastened the two clasps, but didn't open it yet. "I'm one of the oldest operatives here, so he and I go way back really. I tried to assure him that he hadn't been murdering newborns, but he didn't really believe me." Opening the case, he revealed a laptop. "After all, I can't know things for certain, since I have no more facts available than him. He pointed out that Sector Seven had also been absolutely sure the robot wasn't really sentient, but we were oh so wrong about that, so who's to say we aren't wrong about everything else?"

I stared at him, forgetting all about the laptop and accessories he was laying out. The sadness in that tone couldn't be fake. Henry _did_ know, but he couldn't really go to Tom and say 'Hey, I'm an emissary of All-Powerful Superplanar Energy Beings so _believe me_ when I say something.'

"And that's not even factoring the liberties and rights of _others_ he ignored over the years." Henry connected the wireless mouse to the laptop. "Including you and your family."

I looked at him, hard. "So there really _was_ surveillance in Tranquility."

"Not just there. Wherever anyone in your bloodline went. Not a permanent watch, though. Only for a while during the forming childhood years of every new Witwicky, and then on and off, to see if anything 'peculiar' arose." Henry finished setting up the laptop and inputted the login info. "In your case, it was fortunate you were totally ordinary, so I didn't have to jump through hoops to falsify reports and secure more spying shifts for myself. It was nice not to have to deal with the potential extra suspicion."

I stared at him. The way he talked made it sound as if he'd always had a personal interest in me. Or, well, my family line.

"Ah, but enough about that," the man finally finished setting up the laptop and initiated the boot-up sequence. It was the most rugged-looking, high-tech piece of machinery I'd ever seen in that size. Well, human-made machinery.

"Okay, so what's this for?" I moved closer to look at the screen.

"Something to pass the time." He opened an Internet browser but turned the screen away from me, throwing me a sly grin. "Sorry kid, secret info here. Wait like that a bit." I didn't see what he typed, but soon enough it was over and he turned the laptop for me to see again. I noticed that the website address was all in "********" if that was even possible. I didn't recognize the web page by look either. It was pretty plain really, with a basic design in black, white and grey. Metallic grey. Or silver.

It looked like a database of useful links. Huh. For all I knew, it might even be an offline website stored on the laptop's own hard drive. "So what's this?" Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the rangers observing us, but I was pretty sure our conversation didn't reach their ears, even though _theirs_ reached _mine_.

"Hmm." He unceremoniously pulled me into the chair in front of the laptop. I yelped and glared at him, and he just smirked unrepentantly. "See, kid, your ability to understand and replicate actions might be at least partly psychic, so if the one performing an action isn't within your range, whatever it is…" he waved a hand a few times, clearly saying he didn't know or intend to tell me what my range was. At least at the moment. "… then you might not, in fact, be able to replicate it just from seeing it. This website will help us figure out if you _can_ do it. So go on, open a link. Actually, just click that 'Random' button."

Still peering at him suspiciously, I nonetheless did as he said. I clicked "Random" and the page opened to an identical one, but which also happened to have an embedded video.

A video of some dude putting together a gun and demonstrating its use. Specifically, an ICS-190 GLM Grenade Launcher.

Next to the screen there were a couple of paragraphs describing the weapon and its capabilities. I assimilated the information instantly, and at this point I didn't have it in me to be surprised. After all, I'd basically memorized, at a glance, the personal details of all the agents that had been involved in our abduction. Well, the personal info of those moronic enough to actually carry revealing identification of that sort with them.

For a clandestine secret organization, Sector Seven seemed to suffer from some pretty embarrassing lapses in discretion.

Glancing to the bottom right corner, I saw the clock indicating that it was 02:45. Still some time to go until dawn.

Well, nothing to it I supposed.

Settling in for a long wait, I clicked play, and watched.

"-. .-"

It was hours later that my almost trance-like state met an abrupt end. My 'Random' clicks, which never seemed to turn up any link I'd already visited, had opened an e-book on human anatomy and I was going through it at a rate of three pages per second. Once I was done, I reached out to pick up a glass of water I'd gotten myself some time earlier.

I felt the vibration in my chair a nanosecond before ripples disturbed the surface of the water, and I didn't even have enough time to wonder if I was developing telekinesis before the entire Rec Hall trembled as if hit by an earthquake.

Bumblebee, who'd sat down with his back against the wall to my right, suddenly jumped to his feet. _"Alert! Alert!"_ The radio blared as his optics zeroed on me. "_Code red Admiral!"_

"Fuck!" Lennox cursed, jumping from his chair and grabbing his rifle. "We're under attack, aren't we?" His half a dozen soldiers went on alert immediately, even before I had a chance to get out of my seat.

There was a ping on the laptop. All applications suddenly closed and a black command prompt window launched on its own. The cursor blinked twice before words started writing themselves. 'A flier's EMP took out communications. Main Power generators under fire. I'm initiating full evac protocols for civilians, full military mobilizations for the agents. Be there in five to coordinate.' Did he even have _clearance _for that? Alarms started to blare as soon as the last word appeared. "Comms down! Shit!" I hurried around the table, throwing all the hardware back into the briefcase haphazardly. "Shit shit shit!" I looked at Lennox who was almost upon me. "Decepticons are attacking the power generators!"

"Dammit!" Lennox rubbed a hand over his tired face, but that was all the tension he let be seen. Right after, he was all business. "You! Bumblebee right?"

"_Affirmative!"_

"Your fellows. What's their ETA?"

'Bee clicked and whirred, trying to find some radio clip that would help answer. His optics dimmed, and I think he was checking with the others, then they brightened, but instead of amusement or hope they showed worry. _"In my darkest hour, I could not foresee / That the tide could turn, so fast to this degree."_

"On hour?" Lennox asked in disbelief. "We might not have an hour! The thing that took out Soccent didn't even take fifteen minutes to do it!"

Bumblebee shook his helm. "_Not that long now, baby!"_ Contrary to the glib sound clip, I could feel his frustration with his inability to actually communicate properly.

"'Bee!" I shouted, pausing in my packing. Information from five different technical manuals swam through my head. Almost all of it useless. Almost. "Your voice boxes can transmit sound bytes over radio, right?"

The yellow Autobot nodded, but he also voiced his confusion the only way he could _"I've got nothing.'"_

I pointed at him in realization. "I know _yours_ is broken, but you can obviously receive!" I really hoped my idea would work.

The bot straightened. Even his doorwings perked up.

I was operating fully on intuition at this point. "Can you project holograms like the others too? And can you relay exactly what we speak?"

"_Aye aye, sir!"_

My mind finally caught up with what my intuition was trying to tell me. "Can you use all that to patch Optimus through?"

A pause, then Bumblebee palmed his face, and despite that I could see clearly it was a crude imitation of the ever so heartfelt human gesture, I knew his embarrassment was real. Not wasting another second, Bumblebee faced away from us, brought a servo to the side of his head and flipped a switch that hadn't been there a second ago. His optics spilled out light, light that solidified into the figure of Optimus Prime in all his 38-foot-tall glory.

He barely fit in the hall. "Bumblebee," I called out. "Scale it down." I looked up to meet Optimus' optics. "Unless he minds?"

After an instant, Bumblebee cut off the projection and then started it again.

The red and blue mech stood face-to-face with us now, at the same height as the soldier next to me. I wondered how he could so easily split his attention when I knew he was probably driving down the road somewhere in Peterbilt truck form. "Greetings." It was Lennox he spoke to. "I am Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots."

Shaking himself out of the stupor of seeing the robot at full size, even if so briefly, Lennox pulled himself together surprisingly fast. "William Lennox. Captain. Army rangers." The response was crisp, as I'd expected from military. "Good to finally meet you Optimus Prime, sir." Nothing like seeing the Bot in his full, gigantic glory to instill respect.

"Likewise. What is your status?"

Lennox had a firm grip on the rifle hanging on his front. "Enemy attack in progress as of 2 minutes ago. No information on how they knew where to come. They're targeting the power generators. Number of enemies is unknown, but at least one flier confirmed. Reinforcements needed _badly_. What's your ETA?"

"Approximately 40 minutes, but we can-" he was cut off when a muffled explosion reached our ears and the place shook again. It wasn't strong enough to make us lose balance, but no one seemed to care about that any more than I did. Not when everything suddenly went dark.

"Oh crap," I said.

Other than Bee's two blue optics, Optimus was the only source of light left, a glimmering figure in our midst. He opened his mouth piece to say something, but didn't get the chance.

The pitch black around us was replaced by the returning light, but before anyone could say anything the laptop on the table behind me pinged again, making me whirl around in surprise. How on Earth could it even get notifications if the communications were knocked out? "Main power down." I read. "Backup generators on." I felt cold when I saw what the last words were. "You have 20 minutes." I didn't voice the last bit. '_I'll try to meet up with you after I get your parents safely away.'_

No mention of Mikaela, but that was expected. There was no way she would stay out of whatever came next.

"Right!" Lennox snapped, sounding pissed. He looked from Optimus to Bumblebee. "I don't give a damn _what_ that moron Simmons thinks. You're going after the Cube and leaving with it."

The hologram cut off and 'Bee only needed a second to transform into the yellow 2006 Camaro. Both doors opened as soon as he was on four wheels.

I closed and grabbed the briefcase, then shut the laptop and pulled it under my arm, sprinting for the driver door.

"Okay, listen up!" Lennox barked at his men. "Epps, you're with us! The rest of you, on foot! Get to the Cube room on the double! Michaels, you and Jones get the others and meet us there! Move it people!"

The soldiers saluted and ran off, disappearing into the human-sized access corridor.

Lennox sprinted over and got into the passenger seat, wisely fastening the seatbelt. Epps climbed in the back. As soon as that was done, the doors shut and Bumblebee careened forward, knocking aside a table and a couple of chairs as he went. In 4.2 seconds, we were back in the tunnel, and the car was moving forward at a speed significantly higher than the one he'd used to get Henry and me there.

And the speed kept increasing. I was dimly aware of Epps' increasingly frantic mutterings as I kept sinking more and more into the back of my chair from the inertia that the yellow Camaro never allowed to truly run its course.

There was a single turn that had to be taken, the one that would get us out of the tunnel and into the AllSpark chamber. Going forward the rest of the way would mean reaching the hangar where Megatron was being kept (now thawing), and that was the last thing anyone wanted.

Bumblebee swerved sharply, and despite my faith in him I felt, for one moment, that I was about to die. Killed in a car crash and reduced to a bunch of smears on the wall and shattered gears.

The bot cleared the turn with just an inch to spare, and while our seatbelts kept me and Lennox in place, Epps didn't have that luxury, so he ended up face-planting into the window. The groan of pain was very telling, but the lack of slurring implied he hadn't hit it nose-first, so at least there was that.

'Bee blared the horn as loudly as he could when we finally drove into the AllSpark hangar, barely one minute after leaving the rec room. It made a couple of scientists jump aside in fright, even though the bot wouldn't have hit them regardless. Bumblebee stopped several meters shy of the Cube and snapped the doors open. I hurried to get out, still carrying the laptop and briefcase, and Lennox was quick to exit too.

Not as fast as Epps though. "That does it! I'm not doing that again unless I get a seatbelt or I'm driving!"

My Autobot guardian didn't pay him any mind. He swiftly went bipedal and, after a cursory glance around the room, he made a beeline for the AllSpark.

"Hey!" I grimaced in distaste. So Simmons was there. Lovely. Weren't we supposed to be allies now? Even if this was all just the worst ever case of 'enemy mine?'

Bumblebee ignored him, striding uninterrupted, with optics set on the cube. "Hey!" Simmons yelled again from the right, taking off at a fast walk. "Oh thank God-" I blinked in surprise. "Right! Kid!" I turned to him. "Our generators are being picked off! The power to the NBE1 room is failing. If those robot friends of yours are coming, now would be a good time to say it."

"Yes!" Lennox stepped up. "Yes, they're coming, but they won't be here for 40 minutes."

"40 minutes! We don't have forty minutes!"

"We know," Lennox cut him off, pointing at Bumblebee. "That's why he's here."

"Simmons!" I turned my head to behold the source of the voice. Secretary Keller looked harried as he hurried to our position, trailed by his bodyguard, a subdued Tom Banachek and pretty much everyone else working in Hoover Dam right now. "What's going on! Crap's hutting the vents I take it?

I didn't pay attention. I was too busy getting an armful of Mikaela when she finally reached me and hugged me. Mikeala _hugged_ me! Hugged. Mikaela! Me!

Even if I got killed in the next 24 hours, life was good.

Lennox answered Keller instead. "I'm afraid so, sir."

"God save us all," Keller rubbed his eyes, then glanced between me and the mech, and when he saw me seemingly oblivious to anyone other than Mikaela Banes, he returned his attention to Lennox. "Well, for what it's worth the president agreed to cooperate with the Autobots before communications fell. They can do as they see fit and we are to offer any and all assistance we can provide."

Simmons gave my guardian a peculiar look. "Let's hope he knows what he's doing then."

There was a flash of blue light, energy washing over the Cube in a wave.

"Oh, he's doing somethin' alright," Epps muttered.

Before the discussion could continue, Bumblebee began manipulating the Cube, digits digging into indents and twisting previously unseen gears. A hum sent shivers down my spine and through my every fiber. The alien artefact began to rumble and rattle as its construction divided into dozens of smaller cubes, then millions upon millions of smaller ones that collapsed like swarming dominoes. Bumblebee kept sliding his servos over the underside of the AllSpark, slicking and pressing sockets as they appeared.

"Oh my God…" Mikaela murmured, and this time, unlike when the Autobots first met with us, _I_ took her hand in _mine_.

I didn't need to look behind me to know everyone else was enraptured by how the gigantic object folded in on itself until it was barely larger than a football.

When the mech was finished, he gazed upon the object in his servo. _"Message from Starfleet captain - Let's get to it!"_

"He's right!" Lennox cut in, effectively taking over the whole situation. Thank God. "We won't last for long here with Megatron in the other hangar. Especially not unequipped." He faced Bumblebee. "Can you patch Prime through?"

Bumblebee reached up and activated his holo-projector again. Optimus appeared in full size, drawing gasps of surprise and awe, though he heeded none. Spotting the AllSpark in Bumblebee's servo, his optics stayed riveted on it for a long, somber moment. I saw so many emotions pass through him that even my enhanced mind couldn't distinguish between them.

But the moment passed, and Optimus turned to behold us, and despite that everyone knew he was just an insubstantial image the people except me, Mikaela and Will still backed off when the giant mech stepped forward and got to one knee. "Captain. Secretary Keller. You have our sincere gratitude."

I winced.

"Right, don't count yourself lucky yet," Lennox ever so professionally burst his bubble. "Megatron's still thawing and he's just a few hundred meters away."

"Can you not buy yourselves time until we arrive?"

"Not with the power cut. But Mission City is 22 miles from here. We can go and hide the cube somewhere in the city."

"… We will attempt to engage the enemy forces outside the city limits if at all possible." The real message was _that will put a significant number of civilians at risk but _Optimus didn't say it.

I got it regardless.

I could guess what Lennox was thinking too. "We'll try to arrange for aerial pickup of the precious cargo. " _If Megatron gets the Cube, he'll transform technology into drones and kill everyone so it won't matter unless we do this._

"Right! Okay!" Keller seemed glad to finally have a course of action to follow.

"But we can't make a stand without the air force," Will went on, speaking to the SecDef. "Sir, you'll have to find a way to send a message to authorize air support. And we'll need equipment and transports." Keller started brainstorming with Simmons about how that could be done. But it was Tom Banachek who led S7, so that's who Will addressed last. "Do you have an arms room?"

"-. .-"

We almost made it.

Key word being almost.

Despite that I'd basically read instruction manuals and watched tutorials about every kind of gun in that extensive arms room, I didn't get to take any of them along with me. Partly because I wasn't military (and, thus, not authorized) and partly because there were already more people in need of guns than there were supplies. And even if I did get to take a gun, I doubt I'd have managed to get equipped with the speed and precision those soldiers exhibited.

The whole process took astonishingly little time, even though Bumblebee had been antsy the whole while, as he stood outside the arms depot in the access tunnel. Everyone really did give "on the double" a totally new meaning. When we were ready, I took Bumblebee's passenger seat, briefcase in front of my feet, while Mikaela went in the back, next to the AllSpark. And as everyone piled up in their badass black jeeps with miniguns on top, I actually dared think we might manage to make our getaway.

We were all geared and ready to roll out, and nearly everyone not involved in this mess was safely ensconced in bunkers located within the canyon wall. Only Simmons, the SecDef and his weird advisors Glen and Maggie were elsewhere, and the old army radio room they'd headed to was also in the cliff face, not the dam itself. Well out of the way.

Our one mistake was not taking point.

Once everyone was ready to go, Lennox ordered the seven vans to take position around us, to form a perimeter and escort us out of Hoover Dam and toward Mission City. It was a sound plan, and like all plans it didn't survive the enemy.

A hundred meters from the arms room, the entire tunnel seemed to shake under the fury of an impact, far below. Noises of explosions reached my ears, and despite the lighting in the tunnel the flashes of light from behind cast flickering shadows on the road and walls around us.

Then the guy manning the minigun on top of the van right in front of us turned to look back and gasped in shock.

And cursed.

I admit I screamed when a missile came out of nowhere and blew him up along with the transport in a nearly deafening blast of flame and molten metal. Bumblebee swerved wildly, barely avoiding a collision with the remains of the flaming vehicle, but not the concrete edge of the tunnel. It was fortunate we came to a stop, even if we did almost flip over, jolting in our seats and suffering bruises from the seatbelts.

A shadow passed overhead somehow, and I barely got a glimpse of the completely _alien_ aircraft – how the hell could it fly in there?! It barely fit! – before the jet spun on its axis and folded on itself, wings giving way to arms and thrusters making room for legs. The sounds of folding plates were like those of scissors cutting through air, again and again.

Megatron landed on the asphalt about forty feet ahead of us and skidded a few meters, grating in my ears and throwing sparks of superheated rock everywhere. The van behind us tried to adjust course, but it failed and ended up slamming sideways into the giant mech's shin. Megatron barely stumbled, even though the hit had been fatal for the humans inside.

Tom Banachek had been in there… Our path would have led us past the passage leading to the bunkers. It would have taken less than half a minute to pull over, let him out and see him off…

The Decepticon kicked the van contemptuously and batted it aside with his gigantic, four-taloned claw, then focused on us. He didn't even seem to register the five armed vehicles trying to form some sort of perimeter behind him. Red optics pinned us with a manic intensity I wished I could have lived my whole life without ever seeing. "Ah… The AllSpark." It was a rumbling voice that held none of the majesty of Optimus'. Just a crazed fervor that spelled nothing good. He made one step. Just one step was enough to send my heart in my throat. "At last."

From within the car, I couldn't hear Lennox yell any command, but I assume he did, because three miniguns started firing sabot rounds at Megatron's back. The mech flinched, hunching forward in surprise, as if he didn't expect us humans to have weapons capable of harming him.

Nearly submerged in internal hysterics by that point, I wondered if he really thought we only knew how to deal with issues by flinging ice at them.

Megatron _growled_. "Damned _insects_!" Then turned around, meeting the streams of bullets head-on, transforming his claw into a plasma canon as he did. He took aim and his weapon charged-

The tunnel on both sides of him abruptly exploded.

Chunks of wall half his size slammed into the mech from both directions. Debris rattled against his chrome plating and his cannon arm was _moved_. The grunt of pain and surprise devolved into a howl of rage as his shot was deflected rightward. It blew apart the wall and ruined the rest of the supports holding up the tunnel roof. Steel beams that had once held everything in place no longer could be considered whole, and the entire tunnel caved _in_.

I saw it all in slow motion. My brain was processing each and every one of the frames picked up by my eyes. The concrete above cracked and splintered, chunks as large as half my room at home broke off, falling. Megatron saw what was happening and struggled to regain the balance he'd lost.

That was it, I thought as I watched the harbinger of death scramble away from the collapsing structure that had quite effectively cut him and us from the rest of the armed forces. We were toast. We were going to be trapped here with _him_.

But reality proved not to be such a bitch after all, and it made me realize that there was one thing I'd neglected to wonder about. Specifically, why in hell the walls had exploded on Megatron at all.

The giant mech turned around, one claw on the cracked road for support. He would only have to leap forward to avoid being buried.

A dark shadow jumped through dust and smoke from the hole now decorating the right tunnel wall. It leapt, rolled into the space between us and Megatron and regained its balance, foot sliding on the ground as the man settled into a wide crouch. I barely had time to notice the bazooka on his shoulder before a rocket was fired into Megatron's face at nearly point blank range.

The man tossed the rocket launcher aside and hurled himself backwards, rolling head over heels away from the blast. Smoke and dust was kicked up with a thundering roar, but the shockwave had done its part in delaying the mech enough for the debris to bury him. I doubted it would hold him for long, and the howl of rage confirmed it.

Henry – because it could only be that crazy spy hermit – used a hand to push himself up, adjusted his long coat and the strap of the brown backpack he was wearing, then casually side-stepped one last falling piece of concrete before he hastily ran in our direction. I stared dumbly at the new crack in the pavement left by the debris that he had just avoided.

Bumblebee finally pulled away from the wall and, much to my surprise, opened the driver's seat door for Henry to get in without hesitating.

The duplicitous agent undid the diagonal strap holding his backpack and tossed it between the front row seats before getting in. "Drive back the way you came. Go go go!"

Bumblebee's tires screeched against the road as he did the tightest U-turn _ever_, then he hit the acceleration all the way down, rocketing back the way we came. That didn't last for long, though, because the tunnel ahead of us started to cave in as well, and we had to slow down and avoid each larger piece of concrete. What was going on? "_Houston, we have a problem. – It's all coming down – He ain't done yet."_

I paused for a moment. "Megatron's not staying down and the rest of the tunnel's collapsing too?"

_"And the earth split and swallowed'im whole it did – 'twas nothing left, nothing!"_

I didn't know what he… oh shit! "Are you saying the whole dam is about to come down on us?"

_"Affirmative, Captain."_

"What?" Mikaela gasped. "'Bee, are you sure? How do you know? Can you scan that deep?"

"He doesn't need to," Henry cut in, bending forward to unzip the bag he'd brought. "He can feel the vibrations and the way they change as we near the epicenter."

"Who _are_ you?" She asked. "Where did you come from? How did you blow up the tunnel? _Why_ did you do it? How did you even know?"

Henry tossed me an amused glance, then returned his attention to his bag. "To answer those questions in reverse, I knew where the commotion was because of the noise. I got there though a janitorial maintenance corridor. I could do what you just saw because I've been planting remote-controlled explosives of my own design into the concrete that this base is made of for the past seven decades. I came from-"

"What?!" Both me and Mikaela yelled, and I even heard 'Bee's radio produce a burst of static. "What do you mean you slipped explosives into the concrete?" Mikaela asked. Her composure had well and truly been shot.

"What do you mean for the past seven decades?" I asked at the same time.

Henry pulled out a pair of stick-like… things from the bag. "I'm a lot older than I look, lad." He handed me one of the… handheld lasers? What? "Be ready to point that behind you, okay?"

I stared at him, but Mikaela was still in the game. As if I didn't already have enough of a reason to be shocked, she reached behind the AllSpark and pulled out a gun, which she then pointed at Henry's head. "Let's try this again." The click of the safety going off was loud in the tense car. "Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you blow up the tunnel? How did you even know where and when?"

I could only gape, and didn't even register the sharp turn Bee had to take to avoid a falling piece of ceiling. Had she slipped the gun out of sight while everyone else was getting kitted? My intuition had failed to warn me of this.

Mikaela gazed at me rather sardonically. "Don't give me that look, Sam. It's not like you have a monopoly over stunts like this."

I think I corrupted her.

For his part, Henry peered down the barrel of the gun, looking amused and impressed. He addressed me first. "This one's a keeper." Then he grinned and turned in his seat as much as he could, giving my girlfriend a winning smile. "Hello, My Lady. I am Henry Matthews, Sector Seven agent, reincarnated hermit, deep level undercover operative for The Ascended Brotherhood, and Seeker on the Road to Enlightenment. Qualification: Adept."

If ever there were any words that could leave Mikaela Banes absolutely flabbergasted, those were the ones.

Henry only smiled wider, gesturing grandly at the backpack between our seats. "And _this_ is my Bag of Tricks!"

She tossed me a helpless glance, begging me to tell her Henry was the crazy one, not her. Well, he _was_ crazy, probably, but not like _that_. I could only smile helplessly. "I _did_ say you'd get an explanation today…"

My girlfriend (to be?) stared at me, wide-eyed. "You're joking…"

Henry reached into his bag, stopped and looked forward. "Don't turn," he told my car. "Keep going on ahead."

Bumblebee drove past the side-path leading to the room where the AllSpark had been kept. And as he did, sounds of explosions and an enraged roar came from far back.

Crap.

"Oh God, you're _not_ joking are you?" Mikaela's hands dropped, and while she didn't let go of the gun, it was slack in her hands now.

"Put the safety back on," Henry told her, handing her a second laser. "May as well make yourself useful and take this."

"And do _what_?" I shrieked. It sounded as high-pitched as it did before my cognitive readjustment. Maybe the key was not panicking at all. Right.

"Point it behind us, at anything that moves. He's coming," Even as he reached into the bag and Henry never took his eyes off in the rear-view mirror. Whatever he saw, I couldn't tell. But I twisted to do as he said anyway, and after a second the green beam of my laser was joined by a red one as Mikaela did the same. "Window down please." He pulled out a two-foot-long, chrome and yellow rod from the bag and tapped a rune on the middle ring that meant "5." I had no idea how I knew that. The language wasn't part of anything I'd read or watched during the past 24 hours. And it wasn't Mechan either.

Bumblebee lowered the window as requested, just as I saw Megatron, in jet form, come from around the bend. God, he was so _fast-_

Just before the silent count of five, Henry tossed the rod out the window, and I heard more than saw it hiss, split into two halves, which turned out to be rockets. Both of them ignited and hurtled through the darkness, right at where our lasers were pointing. The first one blew up like a highly explosive grenade in the mech's cockpit (damn, but Mikaela's aim was _good_). It made Megatron lose trajectory and hit the wall, forcing him to transform unless he wanted to lose all speed from a collision and fall behind. And just as he did _that_, the second missile reached him, slipping through the momentary cracks of the transformation and ending up conveniently _inside_ him when it detonated.

Megatron howled in surprise and shock when his internal circuitry and energon lines were filled with ice, like the one he'd become so intimately familiar with over the centuries.

Holy shit, that kind of luck was _obscene_.

"Whoa…" Mikaela breathed, still pointing her laser through Bumblebee's rearview window.

"Whoa is right…" I said. But wait. I narrowed my eyes, and I suppose this would be a good time to say my night vision was actually pretty good now too? "He's not down." The mech was getting up, and he was _angry_. "He's not staying down."

"I didn't expect him to," Henry said calmly from next to me.

Far behind us, Megatron bashed aside what was in his way. "What _was_ it supposed to do then? Buy time for another shot?" I stared desperately at The Bag of Tricks like it was the Holy Grail. "Please tell me you have more of those things!"

"I think there's one left," Henry said blandly. "But that's not what the time we bought was for."

"Then what?"

The crazy hermit spy pulled a remote activator from his pocket. A simple thing, a red thumb button on top of a bronze tube. "For us to pass through a certain section of this tunnel so I could use this short-throw signal projector and do… this." He pressed the button.

And a 20-meter section of the tunnel behind us exploded inwards from above and the sides, just as Megatron was passing underneath. I stared and listened at the howl of frustration as Megatron was buried yet again. His rage could be heard even over the racket of the blasts and stone impacts. Then another explosion came from above, then another, and another even higher, adding to the mountain of rocks and steel that the Decepticon would have to dig out of.

Just how many explosives had Henry planted?

As if guessing my thoughts, the man glanced at me sideways. "What did you _think_ I meant when I told you I would have brought this entire dam down decades ago if I had to?"

Behind us, Mikaela shifted her weight, and when I looked in the rear-view mirror her wary suspicion was plain to see.

The tunnel ended, and we were finally at the entrance to the NBE-1 hangar where Megatron had been kept on ice. The scene was one of utter devastation, with fumes and steam hissing from broken pipes, supports and catwalks mangled nearly beyond recognition. Through Bumblebee's still open side window came the stench of death. I was thankful for the chill left behind by the LN2 lines. It made the smell bearable, at least enough that it didn't turn my stomach.

Bumblebee could drive no further in vehicle form, so he stopped and ushered us out. I exited, bringing the briefcase with the laptop along. Mikaela took the AllSpark and followed, and Henry, of course, took his bag with him. Once we were all on solid ground, Bumblebee began to transform, surprisingly slowly. Had the collision with the wall done damage to his internal parts?

I didn't have time to ask because Mikaela set the Cube down and, taking advantage of the fact that Henry had his back to her, pulled her gun again and pointed it at him. "Right." The click of the safety was heard again. "I think now we can continue. What's the deal with this blatant sabotage?"

With a sigh, Henry stood and faced her. "My lady, didn't we already go through this?"

"Tough break." Wow, she was really pissed. I glanced pleadingly at Bumblebee, but the bot had as much of an idea of how to proceed as I did.

Which was none at all. "Mikaela-"

She cut me off. "No Sam. I don't know what he did to make him trust you and I won't care until he tells me exactly why he apparently spent his whole life setting up Hoover Dam to be blown up. I'm not a fan of Sector Seven, but no matter what you say that's not normal or sane."

"We don't have time for this!" I hissed, walking towards her. "The dam is crumbling down! All of it."

"That's the problem, Sam! Since I doubt the Decepticons would bomb this place while their leader was still inside, I'm betting the one who actually caused it is _him_. And I want to know _why_. The only reason I haven't done anything more drastic is because he at least bothered evacuating everyone first."

Hushed explosions could be heard from the way we came.

"I'm waiting."

Henry raised an eyebrow, even gaze never failing. His silence was as blatant a hint as could be done in that situation. It made her bristle, but it did its job: called her bluff.

Which was why him actually _answering_ was so shocking, though he spoke to _me_, not her. "Do you know why we can get charged with alien radiation from these robots or the Cube and not suffer any radiation poisoning? It's because the energy in that Cube, and _them_, follows a completely different set of existential _laws_."

Mikaela didn't like being ignored. "What does _that_ have to do with anything?"

"If you want your answer, young lady, you'll let me give it before that alien catches up with us."

Mikaela glared but didn't say anything more.

Henry faced me fully, heedless of the firearm still aimed at his head. "In every advertisement about batteries, companies say how much energy they store, but that's not really a correct thing to say. Batteries don't _store_ energy. They store substances and electrodes than can initiate hydrolysis and, thus, generate a sustained flow of electrons by maintaining a charge difference, called a current. They don't _store_ energy per se. Capacitors are the ones that supposedly do that, but even then it's a crude definition. But that…" He waved in the direction of the Cube that sat innocently on the ground. "That cube can store energy in its pure form, and it's because that energy was created by a different being than the ones that made _this_ solar system. The energy is different and exists under a different set of _Rules_. It can exist independently even outside of it. Within _anything_ and any_one_."

I could feel Mikaela holding back a 'Get to the point.'

"But lots of that energy has been discharged in this place since the 1930s. Some was used for those experiments, making mutations like the one you saw yesterday. But much of it dispersed and remained embedded in the walls, the floors, even the mechanical parts of this entire dam. But this place was not made to hold the energy. Anyone with the right tools could gather it in a matter of hours. Others that would use it for foolish ends. Sector Seven may have had the potential to do more good than harm, and it did, but there are other factions that we would never bother infiltrating because the same could not be said about them."

"… What are you saying?" The edge had well and truly disappeared from Mikaela's voice.

Henry was dead serious when he answered. "The amount of AllSpark energy in this place is enough to blow up the entire solar system if, say, humans or even Cybertronians decided to try and make their own AllSpark. So yes, I initiated the destruction of Hoover Dam, to make sure the bulk of that energy is washed away and dispersed by the river and, eventually, the ocean."

Another muffled blast echoed from the tunnel, but neither me nor Mikaela paid attention. What we'd just heard was just too chilling, and I could hear even Bumblebee whirr in concern at the words.

"You…" I swallowed. "You know of someone who would try that, don't you?"

Henry crossed his arms, ignoring how Mikaela slowly lowered her gun. "Do you know why the higher powers in legends and scriptures never really give us all the information we might ask for? Setting aside the fact that just because we have free will and think we deserve to know doesn't mean they lack the free will to disagree with our opinion."

I shook my head.

"It's because there's usually a way to find the information through normal channels. And if and when we find that information, it usually means we can handle knowing it, and can act on it wisely. Or we get killed or abducted for it I suppose, but then that's almost always karma at play."

Further wisdom imparting was interrupted by the sound of a particularly loud boom from whence we came.

"Right, we wasted enough time. Everyone stay within the mouth of the tunnel!" Henry ushered us there, including Bumblebee. Once done, he took the briefcase from me, opened it and pulled out the laptop and mouse. He packed the things into the smaller compartment of his backpack and tossed the briefcase away.

That done, he went over and picked up the cube, then walked and held it out for Bumblebee to take. "I'd put it in the bag, but the slightest bump would probably make it discharge enough energy to turn all the gear inside into living, insane robots. Get ready for a long, stiff climb."

Bumblebee tilted his head, then tapped his hip joint. Gears moved, blue-white light flashed and he pulled out some sort of cable from subspace. Taking the Cube in his servo, he began to wrap the cable around it, shaping it into a net with a degree of dexterity that left me bewildered. Second later, it was securely affixed. As if 'Bee had fastened the AllSpark to a utility belt that wasn't even there.

Henry turned and stood between us and the hangar, pulled a longer rod from his coat's inner pocket and touched the small emitter to the indent near the base.

An explosion destroyed the roof of the hangar.

Then Henry connected the small remote to a second port, and another explosion sounded, just as the first cascade of dust and debris crashed over the already huge pile of destruction there. Bumblebee moved to shield us just in case, and I put an arm around Mikaela and flinched along with her whenever another explosion came.

It took another three for the whole episode to be over, and at the last of it Henry turned around, away from the dust that finally spilled over into the tunnel and around him.

And when it settled, I looked forward and saw _light_.

Trading a look with my girlfriend(to-be), we both sprinted to see if we were really seeing what we thought we were seeing. I stared up, and up and up. Bumblebee came to stand next to me and did the same, and I completely agreed with Mikaela when she whistled.

Bloody hell, Henry had just blown a hole through the roof all the way to the road running on top of the dam itself.

The blast that was heard behind us was followed by a rush of air, and we knew our time was over. "Shit! Okay…" I looked around, trying to figure out what to do. "Okay. Grapple guns. We need grapple guns. Do you have grapple guns in that bag of yours?"

Henry quickly led the way through and over the results of the destruction he'd wrought. "Just one. But you'll do better without it. Unless you haven't noticed, there aren't any particularly solid ledges you can aim for."

"What? Then what are we going to do?"

Henry offered a hand and pulled me up on top of a large piece of collapsed ceiling, then did the same to Mikaela. "Your Autobot friend will carry you obviously."

"Oh." I stared at him, then at Bumblebee who'd easily climbed to stand next to us and was eyeing the broken steel beams and walls speculatively. "Right. Okay, so Bumblebee will take us and you'll use the grapple gun afterwards. Right. He should be able to catch it and pull it up."

"That's a wonderful idea I suppose…" Henry said, and something in his tone made me pause in my efforts to climb up through the wreckage. Ahead and above me, Mikaela also turned around, confused.

I wasn't. Something heavy seemed to settle over my shoulders as I slowly turned to look at him, hoping I'd heard wrong. "Oh no…" No _way_. "Oh no no _no_, you don't get to do this! Not after the past hour! Not after the past day!"

"Sam?" Mikaela called out, and even Bumblebee, who was already at the wall, inspecting the closest possible support, turned his helm to watch us.

Henry smiled warmly at me and reached to his chest. Then, in a smooth move, undid the strap of his bag, spun it around him and settled across my torso.

I felt a rock drop in my gut. I couldn't believe this was happening.

Henry tightened the strap until the surprisingly light bag sat comfortably. "Your girlfriend's reaction was tame compared to what's expected for me if people found out what I did here." No. _No_. "Besides, I told you, I'm older than I look." No no _no_, I rejected this situation. I _refused_. "Old enough to have lived a full life. Besides, Sector Seven will be disbanded after this. My mission is over now."

"Bullshit!" I exploded, slapping his hand away from me. "Bullshit, just like that bit about there being no way to use a grapple gun! I can't believe I actually believed that for a second!"

"Sam-"

"No!" I could be damned stubborn when I wanted to, and I damn well was going to be now. "You're coming and I'm not stepping away from this spot until you agree with me." The loudest explosion yet made itself heard from the tunnel mouth. I smirked, despite what it meant for us. "So I guess you'd better change your mind quick, because oth-"

Henry closed in, knit the fingers of both hands with mine, pulled them apart, stepped forward and pressed our bodies and foreheads together.

I felt as if the power of an exploding sun passed through me all at once, and belatedly I realized that must have truly been the sensation of such an experience. When this had happened two nights before, I'd known myself and I'd known _Them_, but now it was different in a fundamental way. That communion of before had healed me of an ailment I didn't know I had, but now I realized that one thing had been missing from it.

I'd know Them and myself, but not _Henry_ who was acting as my healer.

But I knew him _now_, and I knew his name was not Henry. Or hadn't been once, before he was born as this.

His hands gripped mine tighter and then he opened himself to me the rest of the way. I saw him, then. Truly _saw_ him and felt everything about him.

_Samuel, Give me a couple of days before you tell anyone about me, alright?_

Jesus Christ…

_It's not much time at all._

Christ, I was such a _moron_.

_Brooding doesn't suit you,_ _**lad**_**.**

How did I miss all of those…?

_The one life I still remember, the one right before this one, had a lot to do with them._

Was I fucking _blind?_

_I'm a lot older than I look._

He'd dropped me so many _hints!_

I flinched under the intensity of his feelings, and the abundance of his utter _love_ for me brought me to my knees.

Then it was over. My knees were digging into rocks and grime, and the only reason I hadn't collapsed the rest of the way was because he'd dropped with me and was holding me in a tight embrace. My misty eyes stared blankly ahead from where I was leaning into his chest, and the lingering brightness of our connection slowly faded until only the sunlight streaming in from above was left.

Dear _God_… Not a week ago I still thought he was lame and only wanted to sell his heirlooms on e-Bay to make some easy cash. Oh God. Oh my God_. _Oh my _God_.

I didn't even realize I was trembling until the embrace tightened around me.

Megatron was digging himself out, he was going to be there any minute but I couldn't find it in me to care. Not after…

"Set sadness aside, lad," he murmured in my hair. Then he tapped me on the back of the head twice and pushed away, grinning again that specific way of his. "You act like I'm going to get killed."

I looked away and sniffed. Man, I'd almost started crying. In the end, the lame one was me. "Aren't you?" I asked, voice thick.

"Hmm," He climbed to his feet and helped me to mine, but I still couldn't look at him. "I suppose you'll get to see either way. It's a pretty long climb after all." This time, I dared look at him. He was staring up, past the wreckage and into the sky above. I saw it, then, that explorer's spark that must have enchanted his fellow sailors during his previous life. For an instant, I imagined him with white hair, a rugged beard and mustache, and brown eyes like mine. The image was vividly interposed over the present.

Then it was gone and Henry looked at me again. "Don't feel bad. You'll get to keep your word too."

And for once, I was honestly surprised. "Wha-?" Reacted just like him too.

Then I yelped when a large, mechanical servo reached down and plucked me like a random piece of furniture. "Hey! Bumblebee, what-"

"You said you wouldn't step away from that spot until I did as you wanted, so this way you won't have to!"

I glared at Henry's flippancy in the face of doom, then at Bumblebee for his betrayal. Holding onto the plates of the shoulder opposite the one I'd been deposited on, Mikaela was staring at me half-way between awe and concern.

Right. So the communion had been visible. That explanation would have to be a long one.

Not baring to meet her gaze, I looked down at that... that _man_ who was smiling back. "See? This way you don't have to sacrifice the worth of your word for this."

"No, let's just sacrifice _you_, right?" It came out bitter, but how else was I supposed to react now?

Henry narrowed his eyes and titled his head. "Come now, lad, it may have taken _dying_ for me to learn the lesson you learned two nights ago, but I still learned it." He turned away, his coat flourishing like a cape, only keeping his head craned in our direction. "True victory sacrifices nothing!"

I flinched again when he spoke those words, and it wasn't because of the rattling that came from the tunnel, or the sound of engines as the destroyer flew towards us. Nor was it because of the shudders that the Dam kept giving, the shudders that had been getting stronger over the past five minutes.

Henry gave one last look at us, then pinned Bumblebee's gaze with his own. "I leave him to you. Understand?"

Bumblebee nodded solemnly and reached up to briefly lay his servo over me. Then he turned around, bent his legs at the knees and jumped.

He cleared a whole level by that alone, and managed to grab onto the edge of the floor above us. With surprisingly little effort, he heaved himself up to continue on. Higher. Always higher. Through it all, I only stared down, my eyes incapable of tearing themselves from the figure of my forefather until he put an end to the eye contact himself.

With a last glance in my direction, he turned his back on us and jumped down from the pile of wreckage he'd been standing on. With sure steps, he strode around roof pieces and bent railings, ducking under a downed catwalk and disappearing from sight just as Megatron burst into the former hangar in jet form.

My heart jumped when the destroyer shifted in mid-air and landed on top of the scene of destruction. Bumblebee never stopped climbing, even as Megatron looked around, frustration mounting with every second. "Where are you, fleshlings. Where are you hiding?"

I hoped against hope he'd fail to look up, but he finally noticed the presence of _sunlight_ and craned his helm heavenwards.

Red optics met my eyes, and I stiffened. My grip on Bumblebee's shoulder plate got even tighter, knuckles turning white.

"Ah," the mech almost purred. "We meet again, youngling." Slowly, _taunting_, Megatron morphed his right claw into a plasma cannon, aimed it at us and _fired_-

I yelped as Mikaela screamed, but Bumblebee was not so weak to panic, and he was a scout, quick and agile. As soon as the destroyer released the plasma bolt, he threw himself up and to the side. Right servo grabbed precious support the same moment the wall exploded outward on our previous position. It had been nearly deafening, but Bumblebee was already leaning sideways, twisting his backstruts as he freed up his left hand, gun coming out of subspace and firing back.

The bolt hit Megatron in the left shoulder with an effect reminiscent of napalm, and sent him stumbling with a grunt.

But there was no time for joy. The angry, grey mech snarled, whirled around to glare at us. "Oh, so _unwise!_" Then he bent his knees like Bumblebee had done not much earlier and jumped up, form shifting as soon as he'd cleared the shambles-

Two rockets came from the far side of what was left of the NBE-1 hangar.

And this time, both missiles slipped through the cracks during the transformation.

Megatron cried out in pain when blazing hot and freezing ice erupted inside him all at once. The explosion rattled him, and the sudden change in temperature wreaked havoc on his internal systems. It forced the transformation to abort mid-process. Plates snapped back with a hiss and the mech crashed back-first into the disaster below with a gasp of pain and shock. Cranes and catwalks groaned and snapped under the weight in a shower of sparks.

If Lennox hadn't told me about Scorponok's ability to regenerate, I would have risked hoping we'd all get out of this alive.

I followed the trajectory of the rockets to the one section of a terrace that was still attached to the wall. I was just in time to spot my great-great-grandpa lifting a rocket launcher on his right shoulder and sending a missile out like a flame-covered comet.

It hit Megatron right in the face the same moment he saw who'd downed him.

As I stared down in stupefaction at the scene, from where I was on the shoulder of the once again climbing Bumblebee, I distantly wondered where on Earth the guy was getting all those guns. Did he have hidden stashes _everywhere_?

I reviewed the past two days.

… probably yeah.

Megatron howled, more in surprise than pain, and pushed himself to his feet. It was a surprisingly clumsy effort, made no better by how the gravel and debris kept shifting under his pedes, but he had time enough to glare and retaliate with a shot of his own.

Henry tossed the bazooka aside and hurled himself out of the way, somehow rolling and nimbly finishing the move in a crouch despite the huge, blocky backpack he was wearing, and the multi-barreled gun that was strapped over it. The plasma shot exploded meters away from him, taking part of the platform with it. It made his black coat flutter in the resulting wind, but he did not flinch in the least. "Megatron!" He called out brazenly, grabbing the grenade launcher that he must have tossed ahead before he sent out the first two rockets. "Is that the way you greet _all_ your old acquaintances?" He fired five shots, and while two missed, two others hit and exploded against chest and shoulder plates, and a third blew away the debris Megatron's left foot was balanced on, making him slip.

With a growl of fury, the mech lifted himself in a crouching position and used his left claw to crush the pile in front of him into dust. I couldn't see his optics anymore, but I could almost sense the manic obsession with getting the cube being pushed aside. No longer would his single-mindedness render him so vulnerable to cheap shots from us.

God help us all.

Slowly, the grey mech rose to stand. "Very well human," his voice was surprisingly even now. Not wary, but still more focused than I'd heard it until then. "You have my undivided attention." Quick as lightning, his left servo grabbed a broken crane head and sent it smashing forward.

It almost had him, but Henry threw the grenade launcher over the railing and hoisted himself on it, then used his feet to give himself a boost. He cleared the area just as the crane smashed where he used to be, and his jump carried him past a follow-up volley of missiles. He flew far enough to reach out and grab onto a chain hanging from one of the catwalks that had not yet detached from the wall above him, but it loosened _now_.

Not two seconds later, Henry's swing landed him on the ground, and he whirled around to face his enemy again. As he did, his hand reached behind him to grab the portable minigun. I finally realized that the huge pack on his back was the ammo case, just as his spin ended in a flourish of fluttering black and he opened fire.

A stream of bullets with a rate of 4000 shots per minute burst from the rapidly spinning barrel gun. It sounded like a dozen jackhammers beating into concrete at once. It looked almost like a constant assault of laser fire as it cut a swath across the entirety of the hangar, peppering the walls with holes, chipping the last supports from the pillars still trying to stay upright. The sustained attack sliced the air like a scythe, denting armor plates and almost taking out one of Megatron's optics if not for the servo that he used to shield himself.

"Remember me now, Megatron?" Henry's voice somehow carried even over the noise of the minigun. "I found you on ice! And for my trouble you burned my eyes!"

Once his momentum was gone, Henry dropped the gun, shrugged off the pack of ammo on his back and took cover behind a large piece of what used to be the roof of the dam, the one that held up the road.

Not a second too early, because a cannon shot almost blew it apart completely.

I barely even registered Bumblebee's movements as he climbed, and Mikaela was just as speechless by this point as I was.

There was a lull in the fight. Henry, my twice-great grandfather reincarnated, stayed crouched behind cover and waited. On the other side of the ruined hangar, Megatron slowly straightened, and his vents were blowing air through his systems rapidly. I could almost feel his rage, but there was something else in there.

Taking aim, Megatron fired and blasted apart what was left of my grandpa's makeshift cover. The crazy spy pushed away, slid backwards across the floor and finished it on one knee. I couldn't see his face from high up, but I could almost imagine his flat, challenging stare.

And, to my absolute shock, Megatron subspaced his cannon. "I think I will kill you with my bare servos instead." He menacingly advanced on the still crouched form of my ancestor. With a jolt of fear I realized that I wasn't sure if his assumption that Henry was out of tricks was true or not. "Be honored, fleshling, that I would choose to dirty my claws with your blood."

I almost didn't see it from that distance, but something slid from Henry's left sleeve into his hand and he pressed a button.

The floor beneath Megatron's right pede imploded.

Of _course_, I thought numbly. Henry had planted explosives _everywhere_.

The mech gasped in surprise as he lost balance, but with surprising nimbleness for something so large he slammed his servo on the ground to cut his fall, and used the other to across the space in front of him, almost slicing Henry to pieces if not for the fact that he knew it would happen –

I watched in shock as the man jumped and did a butterfly twist through the air, holding his arms close to his chest. He spun horizontally like a windmill and passed through the gap in between the mech's claws. He ended it with the right palm and foot on the floor, fell, rolled across gravel up to right next to the grenade launcher he'd tossed to the ground so much earlier. He took a hold of it when the momentum carried him back to his feet, and his left hand curled around the handle of the minigun nearby as he came to a stop.

The next-to-last grenade in the launcher hit Megatron's right ankle just as he managed to pull it out of the pit it had sunk into, and the ensuing loss of balance let his neck plating open to the concentrated fire of the minigun that came right after, guided to their target by the man who was wielding both high-caliber guns at the _same time_.

I didn't even realize we'd reached the top of our climb. I barely noticed when Bumblebee lowered us to the ground, or that he, himself, had crouched behind us and was staring in increasing amazement at the sight below. Staring and beeping in shock when the evil mech smashed the floor with his servo and pushed himself out of the way of the final grenade that left Henry's launcher. Away from the minigun that still peppered him with rounds.

Away from the _human_.

And instead of gloating or giving us any time to realize that Megatron had actually retreated in front of a puny organic, however briefly, Henry tossed his weapons away and pulled out a familiar rod. "I could have killed you. All these years I could have planted C4 inside your chassis and blown you to scrap. But instead, I used it for _this_." He ran the smaller rod across all the indents in it, top to bottom.

Hoover Dam shook in its entirety, as if level 10 earthquake had just hit it head-on. And half a second later, the sound of the explosions reached us, and they came from _everywhere_. _"May day, May day!"_ Bumblebee's radio crackled. _"She's going down!"_

Mikaela called my name and grabbed my shoulder, but I refused to step away. To look away. This was _important_.

Megatron jerked and looked around in alarm, then glared at Henry. "What have you done, you fool!?"

I didn't know if Henry glared back, but his voice sure as hell didn't suggest he was smiling. "What do you think?"

The floor beneath Megatron cracked, and the mech suddenly had to grab a hold of whatever he could to prevent himself from stumbling as the water began to pool around him and the walls around him began to crumble inwards. But they suddenly exploded, covering him. A particularly large section fell on him, and I knew there was no way he could transform and escape now.

Megatron howled and lashed out with a backhand, sending debris flying all over the place. It was a jerking, primal reflex of rage.

Henry couldn't avoid it all this time. He got hit in the side by a large piece of splintered wall.

I felt my heart skip a beat. Then another, and _another_.

He sailed all across the hangar, somehow missing all the metal poles and pipes sticking out, and the jagged concrete slabs layering the once-hangar. He crashed face-first near the wall opposite the tunnel entrance. But he refused to let that be the end of it. Even as the wall behind and above him split and let water spray through, he pushed himself up.

Black eyes met red optics steadily.

I could almost feel the hatred pouring off the Decepticon as he glared at the man standing tall, his back to the concrete that was ever so slowly cracking further and further.

"Know this, mad creature. I am only paving the way for another. One who is greater than I." He had to be talking about Optimus. No one else even came close to fitting that description in my mind. "He will baptize you with fire." His voice was strained as he struggled to stay on his feet, but his moves were sure as he reached into his chest pocket and produced one final activator. "But for now, I baptize you with water!" The final set of explosives detonated, shattering the wall behind him, giving way to the thousands of tons of water accumulated over decades from the Colorado river.

The whole structure shook. I could feel it under my feet, but I could not tear my eye away from what was happening below.

I saw every instant clearly, as though replayed on slow motion in front of my eyes. The water and plaster had nearly crushed that man and overtaken him when Megatron's pride and insatiable desire for revenge got in the way. With a roar, the Decepticon brought out his plasma cannon and fired, aim perfect, disregarding his word that he would kill Henry with his bare hands.

The plasma bolt reached Henry's position half a nanosecond before the water did, and I would have thought that would be what ended him if not for the memory of what he'd told me, right before Bumblebee picked us up and climbed away with us.

_Set sadness aside lad. You act as if I'm going to get killed. _

Time seemed to slow to a stop to my eyes just as the shot and water were about to end him. My twice-great-grandfather showed utter serenity and was consumed entirely, disappeared in a flash of fire that had nothing to do either of the two.

_It's hard to purify the physical body when everything you eat is 25% made of crap._ _The whole body ends up burning to nothing when Fusion occurs._

_Spontaneous combustion? You mean that actually happens?_

Alien plasma met tumultuous fresh water in a loud, searing, seething eruption of fire and steam, and I knew what everyone assumed had happened, and I didn't feel any urge to tell them otherwise.

My last glimpse of the chaos down under was of Megatron being washed away by the ensuing tide, Hoover Dam cracking and crumbling around him. And as I mechanically followed Mikaela's pull as she hurried me into Bumblebee's car mode, one random thought managed to push its way through the shock that had well and truly settled over my systems.

Apparently, spontaneous combustion was not so spontaneous after all.

Bumblebee shot down the road like the hounds of hell were after us, and I stared blankly ahead, unconcerned with the way the dam behind us steadily crumbled away like in a Hollywood movie about the end of the world. Even when we cleared the dam with barely a second to spare, Miakela's slumping sigh of relief barely reached me.

Only when we drove by the visibly relieved armed forces did I start to come out of it, and even that was only enough for me to notice the Bag of Tricks that had somehow ended up between the two front car seats.

Not even thinking about what I was doing, I unzipped the smallest outer pocket on the top and was strangely unsurprised to find a folder neatly tucked inside.

Pulling it out, I opened it and found a single, white sheet of paper, with a website address written in a language I didn't recognize but understood perfectly anyway. And below the web address were the login details.

Username: Archibald

Password: Amundsen.

I closed the folder with a snap and let my forehead drop to Bumblebee's steering wheel.

How in heavens was I supposed to feel now?


End file.
